PBOT says this is to “encourage less driving and more use of public transit, biking, and other means of transportation.”
There are many transit options people can use to travel to the Lloyd District and attend a Trail Blazers game at the Moda Center or an event at the Convention Center. The Lloyd is one of the city’s top transit hubs – all MAX light rail lines pass through the area and it’s a hotspot for TriMet buses and the streetcar . Yet people still choose to get to their by car. With a new increase in parking fees, the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) hopes to change that.
Starting in September, PBOT will implement an event parking area in the Lloyd, raising the price of on-street car parking from $1.20 to $3 an hour during large events with more than 10,000 people in attendance, such as concerts and basketball games. PBOT says this is to “encourage less driving and more use of public transit, biking, and other means of transportation” and “relieve pressure on people who live in the area, reducing traffic, and making it easier for residents and other visitors to find on-street parking.”
The event rate will apply from 8 am to 10 pm during large events that start at 5 pm or earlier and from 5 to 10 pm during large events that start after 5 pm. Right now, parking meters in the Lloyd east of NE Grand Ave only run until 6 pm, including during large events, so people who park on that side of Grand to attend an evening basketball game may be able to park for free. The increased rate will also apply on Sundays when there is an eligible event – right now, meters in the Lloyd don’t run on Sundays at all.
However, the new policy will also change the meter hours on non-event days to end at 6 pm in the entire district, including in the area west of Grand Ave, which currently runs until 10 pm. It will also increase some meter parking windows in the district from 2 hours to 5 hours.
Event district parking has been in place around downtown’s Providence Park since 2011, where it costs $4 an hour to park a car on the street during Portland Timbers and Thorns games. Proponents of the Lloyd District event parking area have been advocating for the same treatment to the area surrounding the Moda and Convention Centers for years, but Portland City Council only agreed to go forward with it this past April.
Local car parking reform advocates say the Lloyd District is particularly egregious for its abundance of car parking, both on and off the street. While this fee increase won’t solve every car parking problem plaguing the area, advocates say this kind of demand management is necessary for pushing people toward alternative modes of transportation.
But some people weren’t thrilled about the parking fee increase. In April, Oregonian editor Brad Schmidt prompted an impassioned Twitter discussion when he tweeted about the event parking district plan, calling it a “money grab.” From Schmidt’s perspective, PBOT should have first tried simply increasing the meter hours and charging normal rates from 6-10 pm and on Sundays before increasing the fee to $3. Others had the opposite opinion and called on PBOT to increase the fee even more.
PBOT is open about using parking revenue to manage the bureau’s budget deficit. In July, parking fees citywide were raised $0.20, with extra revenue devoted to funding a new Transportation Wallet program to increase access to multimodal transportation for low-income Portlanders. The extra revenue generated from parking in the Lloyd District will also go toward this program.
Another point of contention is due to the fact that the fee increase in the Lloyd District will apply to everyone who happens to be using on-street parking during applicable hours, not just the people attending the events. To mitigate some of this concern, PBOT will allow Lloyd Center residents with vehicles to opt-in to a no-citation list with parking enforcement during event days.
Regardless, the new fee increase won’t send people scrambling. The Lloyd District is rife with parking garages and lots: if residents or frequent visitors of the transit-rich, walkable area feel they need to drive a car, they’ll still have a place to put it.
Like UCLA urban planning researcher (and father of the modern parking reform movement) Donald Shoup foretold, the numbers show that pricing on-street parking according to demand – instead of subsidizing it like cities have been doing up until now – can be an effective tool for reducing car dependency. People won’t like it, because they’re used to parking their cars for free or very cheap. But if we want to get people out of their cars and onto transit, bikes and other sustainable modes of transportation, something’s gotta give.
The first event that will activate the event district parking fee increase is the Rose City Comic Convention on September 9th. After that, the rates will be in effect about 90 days a year – you can check out PBOT’s calendar of events that will trigger the fee increase on their project website.
Thanks for reading.
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If the real goal is to promote people to use other forms of transportation to arrive at the event, reduce the number of parking spaces and increase cost. Only increasing the cost is a money grab in sheep’s clothing. Make event days park by permit only and others will be ticketed ALOT. Charging more to park has limited impact on the decision making of people who already choose to drive.
Light bulb . . .
How about, when TriMet increases frequency of bus lines and new bike infrastructure is available within say a 1/2 mile of a parking structure, then the price goes up?
Otherwise, if prices for parking just go up without the corresponding availability of alternate forms of transportation then the price increases are just going to adversely affect the ones that can least afford it.
5 years ago my wife & I took max to streetcar to a Blazer’s game from the Bybee station in Sellwood. The ride home was double (or more) the time it takes in a car and a homeless person pestered us . No a pleasant experience. That was well before Portland sank to its current squalid status. Portland may be putting more disincentives on game attendance than on car use
Yes, the max should be faster.
Game tickets and concert tickets are $50 a person and up, so adding a few dollars per person for parking will not prevent very many people from attending. Max tickets are $5 round trip per person, so with 2 people in the car you have to park for 7 hours to equal the same cost as the train ticket (ignoring the cost of gas etc)
There are an awful lot of low-income people who work in the Lloyd district and live outside of the Portland area because they can’t afford to live in the transit-adjacent twee inner-city housing that parking reformers/urbanists tend to live in. This supply-side/market-based parking “reform” f#ks them over with remarkable cruelty and specificity.
On the face of it, parking reformers want some of the same things that I do (e.g. abolition of SUVs/personal-trucks/
cars) but, IMO, they seek to achieve these goals via milquetoast reforms that disproportionately harm poor people. From my perspective, no political movement in Portland is more effectively* anti-poor than the intertwined market-urbanist/market-based-parking-reform/YIMBY movement.*the grossly racist and classist exclusion/segregation of NIMBY-presevationists is ideologically more anti-poor than the supply-side economic ideology of market urbanists but NIMBYs have had far less political influence of late so have been markedly less effective.
You care to quantify how many low income folks work in Lloyd? Where do they live? How much do they currently pay for parking during game days?
I don’t doubt soren is right about his, “There are an awful lot of low-income people who work in the Lloyd district”. That district wouldn’t work without a huge number low-income people working low-paying retail, restaurant, service, maintenance, security, and other jobs.
Lloyd and nearby neighborhoods are not very affordable, so people live further away in areas that often have poor transit.
This situation is repeated all over the country, to the point high-rent cities have huge service labor shortages due their being no housing that’s affordable at the pay service workers make, so it would be unreasonable to expect Lloyd is any different.
The same issue was prominent when downtown Portland parking rates went up, also.
Another way to look at it–in more affordable areas, say East Portland, Gresham, Vancouver suburbs, etc., where do people living there work? They certainly don’t all work near where they live. Obviously a lot of them are working in inner areas like Lloyd.
I don’t doubt low income folks work in Lloyd, but how many of them, as Soren claims, live outside of the Portland area and are also paying for street parking on game days, since that’s what we’re actually talking about here.
Soren showed info below that 58% of Portland workers live outside Portland, and since housing is less affordable in Portland than outside it, it makes sense that the percentage of low-income workers who come from outside Portland would be higher. And there’s nothing about the Lloyd District that would tend to make it any different than the rest of Portland in regard to that statistic. So figure 60% of low-income Lloyd workers come from outside Portland.
How many is that? How many low-income jobs are in the Lloyd area? It’s got to be thousands. 60% of thousands is hundreds to thousands.
There are over 40 “game days” for the Blazers alone, and there must be several dozen more that exceed the event parking’s 10K-attendee trigger.
So take out all the low-income people who don’t drive, who don’t have employer-furnished off-street parking, and who don’t work during the hundreds of hours the event parking rules kick in, and it’s still a high enough number to concern me–especially when PBOT took care to exempt residents who choose to park their cars on the street.
Based of LODES data, there’s ~4,500 low income jobs in Lloyd, representing ~18% of total jobs. 63.5% live within 10 miles of Lloyd, largely clustered downtown in the Inner Eastside. That tracks with work from PSU on the CEID which found 14% of CEID jobs were low-income, with 76% living within 10 miles (58% lived within 6 miles, 38% lived within three). However this is only modestly relevant. There are 1250 paid street parking spots in the parking district. On non-event days they are 40% filled, which is a good proxy for what percent are filled by workers as opposed to event attendees. That’s 500 spaces. If we assume that the 18% of low income workers also occupy 18% of the paid parking spaces, then we’re looking at about 90 low income workers. Which, to be sure, is a burden on them. But it’s not hundreds (thousands!) of workers.
Your data supports what I wrote.
I wrote, “How many low-income jobs are in the Lloyd area? It’s got to be thousands”. Your data says 4,500, matching what I said.
Then I said, 60% (from soren’s statistics) of thousands is hundreds to thousands”. Your data says 63.5% live within 10 miles–meaning 36.5% live more than 10 miles away. 36.5% of 4,300 is 1,570, again matching my “hundreds to thousands”.
But 10 miles from Lloyd Center puts you well outside Portland–the east city limits are under 8 miles away, west and south under 5 miles, north just over 5 miles. So the number “outside Portland” would be well over the number over 10 miles away. That makes my “hundreds to thousands” conservative by your data.
I never said the number parking on the street is that high–in fact I said you have to subtract out “people who don’t drive, who don’t have employer-furnished off-street parking, and who don’t work during the..events”. It’d be great if it’s only 90 workers affected, but that’s still enough to concern me–again, especially when PBOT chose to give relief to residents who park on the street during events.
But even assuming that, per your data, only 18% of Lloyd workers are low income, your assumption that they park on the street at the same rate as better-paid employees would mean that companies provide off-street parking for low-income workers at the same rate as for higher paid workers, which seems doubtful. Using a more realistic percentage puts the number of impacted low-income workers well over the number that already concerns me.
I note that you don’t show your work.
Why is that?
In point of fact, LODES data does not actually stratify by any widely accepted low-income definition but uses crude cut offs:
Many of those in the $1,251-3,333 cohort would qualify as low-income according to HUD median household income definitions. Did you somehow include these “workers” in your calculation or did you arbitrarily decide that only people who earn less than $1,251 are low-income (this would be in bad faith, to be blunt).
And how did you select the Lloyd district area from a crude mapping tool. Perhaps you just eyeballed it and guessed.
I’d love to see you show your work here, again. It’s my guess you are extrapolating from crude dots on a mapping tool rather than any rigorous analysis.
Even if this were, indeed, accurate for HUD low-income cohorts, the assumption that transit-deficient areas don’t exist in a 10 mile radius surrounding the Lloyd district strikes me as unfortunate.
I should also note that some in the $3,333+ cohort would qualify as low income depending on household size.
I’m not necessarily opposed to a policy that targets people driving to events but to give increasingly wealthy residents of the lloyd district an “opt-out” while ignoring low-income workers is particularly cruel and unjust. And this is especially the case given that lower-wage workers make up the bulk of workers at hotels, the convention center, the veterans memorial colliseum, and the moda center.
That opt-out for residents but not workers jumped out at me immediately, for the same reasons you mention.
Please let PBOT know that lower-income workers who use street parking also deserve an opt-out mechanism by contacting the planner via email or phone:
Kathryn Doherty-Chapman
Kathryn.Doherty-Chapman@portlandoregon.gov
503-823-4761
Some talking points: :
If PBOT is going to live up to its equity goals, lower-income workers also merit an opt-out mechanism. The unacceptable 9/30 opt-out deadline should also be extended by several months and PBOT should engage in outreach to affected lower-income people who use street parking.
https://www.portland.gov/transportation/parking/lloyd-event
If folks live further east, all they need to do is get to Gateway, then take Max into Lloyd Center. They can park for free.
There’s a reason why hardly anyone parks at Gateway anymore. Give you a couple wild guesses. . .
Perhaps if there was a way low income folks could be easily identified including their vehicles, then we would know not to apply regressive taxes and fees on them.
It’s illustrative that high-income people living in luxury “condo” towers can “opt out” while low-income hourly workers in restaurants, fast-food joints, convenience stores, bars, marijuana dispensaries, corporations* (e.g. fossil fuel energy firms, real-estate-speculation firms, and health-industrial-complex) are not even considered.
*many low-wage “on the clock” workers do not have access to parking spaces in the fancy controlled lots used by clients, patients, and salaried workers and this is especially true for shift and part-time workers.
Considering that ~60% of Portland workers do not live within Portland city limits, I don’t think it’s a stretch to argue that low-income hourly employees might not be able to afford a ~$2000/month luxury 1 BR in the Hassalo.
A 2013 analysis from the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis shows moderate concentration of low and middle-wage workers (e.g. workers who tend not to have private parking spaces) in the lloyd district:
https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2013/10/29/portland-polarization-maps/
PS: I challenge anyone who thinks “let them park 8+ hrs in a commercial/mall lot” to give this a try for a week or so and see whether their vehicle (owned or rented) gets towed.
So, you don’t know where they live and you don’t know how much they currently pay for street parking on game days. Got it.
Sigh.
I mostly bike to work in the Lloyd district but very occasionally I drive. Given that I almost never find a spot in my employer’s lot (impossible, I must be lying!!!1!!!), I almost always park on-street and pay a $5 for 5 hours parking kitty fee (not $1.20 as in the OP).
I find it amusing that you are asking me to do a PUMS query of workers in the Lloyd district that requires reconciling micro-district geographies and stratifying based on wage income and residence. Sorry, Will, this is not going to happen due to work/life constraints. I did forgot to quote the source of my ~60% of Portland workers living outside of city limits (oh-so-transit accessible, am i right???):
Oregon Employment Department:
https://www.qualityinfo.org/-/how-oregonians-commute-to-work
I don’t think the assumption here—that it’s higher income residents parking on the street—is necessarily accurate. While there aren’t any new condo buildings in the Lloyd, the relatively recently built Hassalo on Eighth rental apartments sit on a giant parking garage. In contrast, the 240 units at the affordable housing development the Louisa Flowers have no on-site parking.
I asked my colleague who lives in the Hassalo whether they pay for parking and they said that they park on city streets to avoid the $165 per month fee. I see an awful lot of high-end vehicles parking around the Lloyd so I expect they are not the only one who does this.
FWIW, I would enthusiastically support an opt out for both lower-income residents and workers (and no opt out for higher-income residents).
We don’t go into other cities and tell them how to manage their parking and streets. Same should apply here. We are Portland not Tigard or Vancouver. Plan for Portland.
Joan: Some mechanism for these workers to opt-out would have been a beginning. An equity-based re-shaping of parking policies that centers the needs of low-income workers (many of whom commute from areas outside of inner Portland) would be a longer-term goal.
“ equity-based re-shaping of parking policies”
We have real problems in this city that need to be fixed first before we delve into this nonsense.
Probably why they put it as a “longer term goal.”
It’s important to look at how policy changes intended for good negatively impact poor and poorer folks for sure. What would you suggest as a way to address the issues you are raising? I’m also wondering what strategies these folks are using now during big events in the area, because parking and congestion really is a mess already.
**Comment deleted by moderator. I know you’re trying to be funny, but just be more careful. Thanks. – Jonathan**
Soren already gave a thoughtful, reasonable answer to Joan’s thoughtful, reasonable question before you wrote your fake one.
As someone whose family was tortured and imprisoned by a communist regime, I definitely yearn to have more of my family members tortured and imprisoned.
On that note, I’m done posting here for a while.
Yeah, I’m just not sure the value in posting this kind of response to BikePortland. This is just a mocking of Soren (who gave a sincere answer to my sincere question), and adds nothing except hostility. There’s no attempt here to engage with the question at hand, just to insult. I often disagree with Soren but I don’t really see why you all want responses like Sigma’s here on the website. Like, does this meet moderation rules in spirit?
Following this thread on what would be a decent stop gap – Certainly an opt out would work for worker vehicles – or employers/city distributing transportation vouchers to those working in Lloyd travel – either for public transit or paid parking with the preference being public transit (if trimet can hire backfill drivers and and fix their rout schedule).
I want to disincentivize driving, but for poor working folks strapped for time commuting from outside Portland to work in Lloyd the car maybe the only option sadly.
Commuting by car is also the only option for people commuting from areas of Portland that are transportation deserts (e.g. most of outer E Portland).
Fair enough. I suppose for these 90 odd event days providing parking vouchers (validation?) would mitigate this increase placed unfairly on such workers. Thanks for the discussion.
I’d support vouchers year round (and I’m generally not a fan of voucherization).
I don’t think this will affect many local workers. How many people work in the Lloyd district and doesn’t have free car parking provided by their employer? The Lloyd center, the convention center and the stadiums and the office buildings have parking for employees.
Maybe a couple of the small restaurants on Broadway don’t have parking. Most do have free parking lots but there are a couple that have no off-street parking east of Grand- but workers will still be able to park 3 or 4 blocks away for free, and walk for 5 minutes, based on the map in the larger plan. If they are disabled they can park for free on the street still. Their employers also may arrange free parking at another lot, since there are many empty parking lots north of the Lloyd Center now.
I work in the Lloyd district and there is a huge shortage of parking for employees with a fair amount of existing parking reserved for specific uses or for more senior people. Many of the lower-income workers I know use on-street city parking due to this parking shortage.
The lack of knowledge of conditions in the Lloyd district for workers (serious attacks and lack of safety are major issues) and the glib assumption that there is plenitful parking on NE Hancock are bad takes.
This is simply not true. The City of Portland has been nixing these kinds of requests in the Lloyd district for many years. FWIW, I agree with their rationale (employees should stop subsidizing driving) but don’t agree with the City of Portland’s cruel lack of interest in how this ongoing “parking” war affects lower-income people.
Low income earners are eligible for the Transportation Wallet. That card is locked to paying for transportation services (cabs, transit, parking) and funded by parking fees.
And how man low-income earners live in transit-rich area of the Portland metro area?
Easy solution: every parking meter requires the user to scan their latest tax return. The parking fee will be based on lased year’s AGI.
you say this in jest, but I honestly, I would be in favor for such a system that ties income to supplementing these sorts of fees.
What a banger of a comment. You nailed it on the head.
Raising parking prices seems more stick than carrot. Boomers who pay $150 to see Steely Dan or whatever are still going to drive. They’ll complain about the price, sure, but I don’t think the price increase will fundamentally change their behavior that much. I know that pricing parking can tweak the utilization rate and congestion from people looking for street parking, but I don’t think in this case it’s going to make much of a difference in transit or bike ridership.
I understand they’re different agencies, but if TriMet keeps cutting frequencies people will pay $16 an hour for parking rather than sit under I-5 for 45 minutes waiting for MAX or a bus to show up. People always throw “there needs to be viable alternatives to driving” out there as NIMBY rhetoric, but in this case it’s absolutely true. Most transit in Portland is not useful after about 10:30 PM, and MAX trains get real weird at night. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll ride it, but that’s only because I’m a transit/bike geek. Nevermind the people going to a game or show, what about the service workers that aren’t getting off until long after the fans have left? Someone else mentioned lack of secure bike parking – that is definitely a huge issue as well.
Would it make more sense to designate parking spaces as being specifically for workers at the Moda, Colosseum, etc, then make them completely free for those workers to use? Don’t know how you’d even manage that but I’m just a guy on the internet. Honestly people who live in the burbs and work “odd hours” jobs don’t really contribute to traffic congestion to the extent that their 9-5 email job counterparts do, so I don’t think we should punish someone making $15 an hour by making them blow 1 1/2 hours wage on parking.
For what it’s worth, I do choose to bike or transit to the Lloyd regularly, but that’s because I’m lucky enough to live in a spot where that’s viable. I also hate driving at night, like being able to get smashed at Winterhawks games, and despise parking garage lines.
Don’t worry Soren – the city will find a way to make sure the Climate and Equity fees only get applied to people making 125K+
Yeah kind of like the city funded “Fixing Our Streets” with a progressive income tax that disproportionately targeted people making well over $100,000.
Oh wait…
Or make the alternatives good enough that people will want to use them.
This here. I’m certainly for tolling and increasing parking fees to decrease vmt AND think this city needs more robust well supported and subsidized transit alternatives. And I’m willing to help pay for it.
The city needs to have a robust and secure individual bike locker program. I wouldn’t feel safe leaving my bike locked outside of the Lloyd area or really any area around town for more than 30-45 minutes – and that is with double ulocks. Really your bike is only as safe outdoors as however long it takes some some tweaked out nu-meth zombie to spot your bike and come back with a angle grinder so yrmv
Such a locker doesn’t exist. Since law enforcement is nonexistent and property crime has essentially been decriminalized (for Our Houseless Neighbors), you’re on your own.
Portland’s main bike routes connecting north and northeast to the westside go through this area, and anyone who bikes over the Steel or Broadway Bridges around the start or end of large events knows it’s not just parking that’s a mess. Biking there during that time is super stressful with all the additional car traffic, and especially drivers who don’t drive in town around bikes very often (or at least that’s my impression). I’m hoping this improves things all around.
thanks for bringing this up joan! Maybe increased parking fees will yield safer streets?
PBOT had a golden opportunity to transform 7th into a safe bikeway but repeated the same white-centered outreach that led to the Williams conflict. And then they pointed their fingers at “loud” volunteer advocates as if a tiny number of active transportation geeks somehow forced a massive city bureau to once again marginalize the black community.
Maybe it’s my reading because I’ve learned so much about this already, but it seems underreported that these are rates for this year. PBOT has a schedule/table of rate increments to adjust for parking demand. I believe the goal is 80% utilization, and the rate is adjusted during annual budgeting. That means rates may go up or down depending on demand, by a set amount.
Nobody likes paying more, but this is a place where a plastic cup full of beer costs $12, and “parking for rich people” is much nicer in the Garden Garage.
This is a good point about the garage. There is already tons of private paid parking at the Rose Quarter, anyone looking for street parking for an event is just trying to save a buck by making the city store their metal cage at a discount rate. I vote they remove most of the metered spots and replace them with zoned permit parking. Any meters should be short term only, and patrolled heavily during events. If you don’t want to pay $20 to park at the rose quarter, then you can take the many transit options available in the area. Timbers games have 20K fans, any idea what the mode share is for a Timbers game? Anecdotally it seems like a ton more bikes and transit riders.
If Portland were serious about pandemic recovery we’d be reducing parking rates, not wringing our hands about climate equity microjustice or whatever buzzwords bring home the most paychecks to the unending stream of consultant grifters.
Portland needs common sense solutions, not more regressive taxation of the working class.
Visiting an upcoming event at veteran’s. We live not far away in Sullivan’s Gulch so figured the family would ride.
Was shocked to find there is ZERO information about bike parking on the internet. Moda’s site has some marketing babble, but only parking gets detailed directions.
20 min on Google streetview confirmed my fears, they seem to only have one super sketch rack near Interstate. Nothing near veteran’s. I’d be shocked if our bikes were there when we came back.
There’s solid bike connectivity there should be safer and more convenient racks! (Please tell me I’m wrong, it’ll help me out!)