The city council will be considering an ordinance adopting a street impact fee this Thursday. You may recall that FAN’s membership voted to urge city officials to base the street impact fee for a project primarily on the amount of parking.
I was excited to see that the proposed ordinance acknowledges our argument that:
Since the impact fee is supposed to be for automobile impacts, the city should base it on factors that more accurately reflect the impacts on automobile infrastructure. The number of parking spaces (or the square footage of parking) is a proxy for the extent to which visitors and occupants of a development will impact nearby streets with automobiles and potentially require automobile infrastructure upgrades.
The city council has not yet approved this proposed ordinance, and the parking provision may seem like a small detail, but I see it as significant progress towards the larger goal of making our city officials aware of the consequences of parking policy.