Austin Transportation Department’s Residential Parking Program team is working with papercensus.org to make it easier for residents to obtain RPPs, and we need your help!
We would like to interview residents that have applied for an on-street residential parking permit. You’d spend 30-45 minutes over the next week with a member of our research team answering questions about the RPP process from your perspective. If you are willing to be contacted by the research team to set up a time, please email Sarah Shields at sarah@austintech.org. We appreciate your valuable feedback.
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Thanks for posting this @sarahATA! Are there any ways that we can help make RPPs harder? =) I think most people here would consider RPPs to be one of the worst programs in the city (and maybe even illegal). It effectively takes a public resource (street parking) and hands it over to wealthy private homeowners at the expense of everyone else in the city that could benefit from street parking and with no benefits to the city. The streets should be for all of the taxpayers to use that pay for them and shouldn’t be privatized. Also, RPPs make streets less safe for pedestrians because cars drive faster when there aren’t cars parked on the street. If homeowners want a place to park their cars, they can always put a parking space or more on their own lot to park their cars.
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@sarahATA RPP is being used by neighborhood preservationists as the primary tool of resistance to limit redevelopment in the face of our city’s housing crisis. Concerned residents should be working to eliminate RPP, not expand it. RPP makes life for Austin’s beleaguered middle & working-class more cumbersome & expensive. I am hopeful ATA will reconsider its position on this issue.
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@sarahATA, are you trying to get permits for a property that is on a block participating in RPP already?
Or apply for a new block to join the program?
Or, both, or neither?’
hi @Phil_Wiley, I am looking to chat with residents who have applied for a residential parking permit, after the zone was established, not residents who have petitioned for a new RPP zone.
I’m happy that ATA is reaching out to FAN members about this issue and the below is not meant to detract from that. However, I’ve been to enough public input sessions; seen Nextdoor drama; and been to City Hall to know that this feedback is nothing compared to ANC and other NIMBY organizations.
I agree, with @Pete_Gilcrease.
From my perspective, RPP needs to be significantly overhauled or scrapped all together. It’s a noble goal to work for government programs to be more accessible to all citizens. However, RPPs are inaccessible to the vast majority of the public. As Pete points out, wealthy well-connected homeowners have been highly successful at co-opting the public right of way in front of their homes for their exclusive benefit.
It’s difficult for me to see how making RPP permits easier to obtain by these homeowners is a net positive for the rest of the city. I understand this is a political issue that we’re bringing up and likely outside your purview.
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