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WEST MAIN STREET PARKING OPPORTUNITIES AND ANALYSIS City of Charlottesville Nelson\Nygaard Consulting Associates Inc. | 4 INTRODUCTION The City of Charlottesville retained Nelson\Nygaard to conduct a parking analysis along the West Main Street corridor. The work was performed in conjunction with the West Main Street Streetscape study being conducted at the same time and is intended to help inform the City of Charlottesville’s assessment of the parking demand along the corridor, the potential and opportunities for change, parking alternatives and the need to provide additional off-street parking to accommodate existing development and future growth. The parking opportunities and analysis study is a continuation of the work that the City of Charlottesville has completed to date in evaluating its parking supply. In 2008, the City conducted a Downtown Parking Study to assess existing conditions and project future parking requirements. The report concluded that the creation of a parking management plan would enable a proactive relationship with parking as compared to the current reactive approach. This included the recommendation of creating a Parking Department or Division where parking could be managed on a full-time basis. The following report is a review of the City's existing and projected parking supply and demand, along the West Main Street corridor and whether or not its supply is adequate for its current and projected land use under existing conditions and proposed modifications. PROJECT APPROACH This consultant’s approach focused on collecting as much existing use information as possible to develop a profile of parking activity along West Main Street. Key questions the data was intended to answer included:  Identify existing issues.  Estimate the existing private and public parking supply in the West Main Street corridor  Collect and analyze parking demand and utilization data in the corridor.  Identify parking demand management alternatives based on proposed land-use development and best practices.  Identify off-street parking options to explore. To answer these questions, the consultant collected and reviewed all existing studies related to parking as well as all zoning code and regulatory language influencing the operation and provision of parking in the corridor. Several data collection tasks were conducted, including:  Parking Inventory. In September, 2014, the consultant conducted a field inventory of all public and private spaces within the West Main Street study area, creating a detailed map and database of all regulations, time-limits, hours of operation, ownership, etc.  Parking Utilization. During the late September, 2014 timeframe, the consultant conducted field surveys of select off-street lots and all on-street spaces in the inventory to establish their daily parking utilization. Observations were conducted every two hours for 12-hour periods on average weekdays and weekends