Parking in the Urban Core

This paper explores parking policy as it relates to the creation of densely populated downtown city centers. The impacts of careful parking planning, correlated with other factors such as streetscape and building design, dictate how people move around their community. This topic is even more important as cities across America have seen a resurgence in their population and are for the first time in decades, laying out new plans and goals of what they are seeking to achieve as it relates to land use. The City of Rochester is one city that is working to create lively streets as stated in their 2014 Center City Master Plan. A qualitative case study analysis will be used to understand what other city’s have done with regarding to parking planning. This analysis will demonstrate that innovative approaches to parking planning written into a city code can have a desirable impact. The Project for Public Spaces (2015) states that opportunities such as these have poised American communities to properly prioritize transportation options, just as the City of Rochester has done in their Plan. There is much to be learned and subsequently, planned carefully, as it relates to the built environment and the carefully woven urban fabric.