AURORA | What comes first? The seat on the train or the parking spot at the train station?
More importantly for city planners, the question of whether Aurora’s light rail stations, which will be open in 2016, will be crowded and busy enough to justify charging riders for parking.
The question of paid parking spaces in Aurora is a touchy subject, especially considering the only metered parking within city limits is just south of the busy Anschutz Medical Campus.
But the city is preparing for more parking and perhaps paid parking. According to city documents the city will hire a new parking manager who will be paid anywhere between $76,000 to $125,000 per year to oversee the new division. Currently, that position doesn’t exist within the city.
Interim Aurora Finance Director Terri Velasquez said despite the city creating a department devoted entirely to parking, charging for that parking is still a future decision to be made by council.
Velasquez said the city hired consulting firm Kimley-Horn in December to create a business plan for parking in anticipation that demand for spots will come from more people in Aurora using the 10.5-mile line that will run along the I-225 corridor from Nine Mile station at Parker Road to Peoria Street on the Anschutz Medical Campus and connect with the East Rail line to Denver International Airport.
The city is paying the consulting firm $225,885 to survey area businesses and residents on whether they would pay for parking near the light rail, help recruit a parking manager, and create a brand for Aurora’s new parking division.
She said the firm’s parking plan is scheduled to be completed by late June of this year.
Brett Wood, a parking and transportation planner with Kimley-Horn, said the firm is researching whether a pay-to-park model would even work or be necessary when the light rail opens in Aurora.
“We’re not walking into this with the preconceived notion it needs to be paid,” he said. “We’ll have specific recommendations for several stations for managing parking day one when it opens and for five years from now if some of the transit-oriented development is realized.”
Wood said the general threshold for when parking becomes a premium is when a garage or lot is 85-percent occupied on a regular basis. That milestone has already been reached by Aurora’s Nine Mile Station, which has a 94 percent occupancy for its 1,225 spaces, according to RTD spokesman Scott Reed.
Aurora city planners have also long contended that the 1,800 spaces allotted for I-225’s eight station’s as part of FasTracks 2004 voter-approved budget are not enough, and that the city will have to come up with creative solutions for more parking.
John Fernandez, who oversees FasTracks for the city’s Planning and Development department, said in 2010, the city conducted its own study of parking needed along the Aurora line and found that on the low end, the line needs at least 3,335 spaces to accommodate potential commuters.
So far, the city has financed a two-story, $10.5-million parking garage at Iliff Station that city planners say can be expanded to four floors in the future if commuter demand increases.
If Aurora does charge for light rail-related parking when the line opens, it will be a first in the metro area.
“As far as we know, no other jurisdiction is contemplating charging for parking at this time,” Reed said.
He said other cities have instituted some neighborhood parking permits to accommodate new light rail lines.
RTD Park-n-Rides are also not entirely free. They charge out-of-district users $4 a day to park and district users pay $2 a day to park longer than 24 hours, Reed said.
When the RTD West Rail Line that runs 12 miles between Denver Union Station and the Jefferson County Government Center-Golden Station opened in 2013, neither Golden or Lakewood developed a parking plan.
Rick Muriby, a planning manager with the City of Golden, said the city is working on a parking plan now for its downtown area that has more to do with accommodating the students and visitors than with RTD commuters or the West Line.
“With regard to our light rail station, we have a parking garage there that is never close to being full, so there has been no need to address vehicle parking so far,” he said of the 705-space Park-n-Ride next to the Jefferson County Government Center. “We have been focusing our efforts there on getting more bike parking, pedestrian linkages and bus amenities.”
David Baskett, a traffic engineer with the City of Lakewood, said Lakewood has not instituted any residential parking permits despite the fact that many Lakewood stops on the line have stations located along neighborhood streets.
“We took the position that a neighborhood parking permit system carries a lot of downsides to it,” he said. “If you just jump in ahead of time and do residential permit parking, you create this big bureaucracy. If you don’t need them, you don’t want them.”
He said Lakewood has not seen any issues with its three Park-n-Rides that provide a total of 2,200 parking spots being too full. The W Line has a total of six Park-n-Ride stations with 5,605 spots.