LYNN — The city is soliciting community feedback on draft recommendations for its downtown parking strategy through an online survey.
Principal Planner Aaron Clausen said the plan is to keep the survey open until July 19.
The Planning Department is working with Stantec Transportation Planners to conduct a thorough study of the city’s downtown area and provide final recommendations by sometime in the fall on how to make parking more conducive to the area’s economic growth.
“It’s about economic development and making downtown a more accessible and vibrant and exciting place. Parking is just a resource to help support that outcome,” Clausen said.
The draft recommendations include more than 20 suggestions, including implementing a more targeted pay-to-park system, reducing street sweeping in various neighborhoods, updating signage, and adding parking ambassadors to streets so people can ask them questions.
Clausen said the recommendations are based on an initial survey and two public meetings that identified key concerns among the community. Approximately 300 people took part in the survey.
He said residents were particularly concerned about finding parking during street-sweeping hours, and that many felt constricted and “rushed” by two-hour parking limits.
Clausen added the feedback revealed that “availability is not evenly spread across downtown.”
One of the recommendations includes removing most or all of the downtown area’s timed parking limits and adding parking meters to allow community members to park their cars in the area for an unrestricted amount of hours with proper payment.
“We want to make it as easy as possible to get downtown and stay downtown, and to do whatever you want to do,” Clausen said.
Clausen said with this strategy, the pricing would be dynamic. Parking that is further away from businesses would cost less money and parking that is closer to them would cost a little more.
“We’re not talking about huge (price) increases,” he said. “We’re just talking about setting a pricing strategy that is a little bit lower for underutilized parts of downtown and a little bit higher for highly utilized.”
He added the off-street parking lots would have lower prices for long-term parking.
The goal is to have an 85% utilization rate, which would mean every street block has an open parking spot, Clausen said.
“So if you really want to, you should be able to park on the street block for the destination you’re trying to go to,” he said.
The timeline for the implementation is uncertain, as some of the recommendations include receiving funding from the city and policy changes that would need approval from the Off-Street Parking and Traffic commissions, Clausen said.
However, he said some changes could be implemented as soon as six months to a year from now.
Community members, including those who work, live, own a business, attend school, or own property in Lynn, are welcome to take the survey to provide feedback on the recommendations.
“We need the perspective of the community,” Clausen said. “This is a conversation.”
The survey can be found at https://lynnincommon.com/parking/surveys/recommendations .
