EDITORIAL: Embrace ‘The Parking Problem’

Shades of dèjá vu. Vibes from the funny movie about an endlessly recycling Groundhog Day. Hints of a TV rerun that refuses to go away. The Parking Problem is back.

Actually, the Port Washington Parking Problem never really left. It has been around ever since storefronts were refilled during the downtown rejuvenation several decades ago. Fluctuating parking stress levels among merchants and residents revive consternation about it every few years.

In the latest example, a downtown restaurant owner complained to the Port Washington Traffic Safety Committee that her customers have trouble finding a place to park because street parking spaces and a public lot adjacent to her business are usually filled. “Where’s the relief for our businesses?” she asked. She said city officials should do something about it.

The chance of that happening is approximately zero. The Parking Problem is endemic. It is not going away. And if a shortage of the most preferred parking spaces really is a problem, there is little the city officials can or should do about it.

Every shopper’s and restaurant diner’s dream is a parking space a few steps from the front door of their destination. Most people understand the odds of that coming true are roughly the same as buying a winning lottery ticket.

Fortunately, it doesn’t matter. Other places to park are available. The simple trick to finding them is a willingness to walk a little bit.

Port is well suited for that, with ample parking space in offstreet public lots and side streets and a main commercial street made easily walkable with wide sidewalks and safe pedestrian crosswalks.

If convenient parking were a requisite for a successful small-town business district, many communities now enjoying profitable visitor traffic would be on hard times. Parking in Cedarburg is more cramped than in Port Washington, yet the city thrives as one of southeast Wisconsin’s most popular destinations for visitors who are attracted by the shops, restaurants, galleries and other features of its historic downtown but not deterred by parking challenges.

The same is true of some communities in Door County and others in the state that have a lot of charm but little convenient parking.

The complaining restaurateur did, however, correctly identify a contributing factor to Port’s parking stress—workers at downtown businesses filling downtown parking spaces and staying all day.

That isn’t the city government’s concern, but it is not too much to ask that business owners strongly encourage their employees to leave prime parking spaces available for customers and walk a couple of blocks to work.

Port Washington has tried various means of parking control. Parking meters for many years were all the rage in the city—in more ways than one. The meters standing guard over virtually every downtown parking space did more to provoke rage among drivers who were fined for failing to feed a meter or vacate a parking space before the time limit expired than to control parking. This anger was particularly acute among visitors, who took the meters as a message that they weren’t wanted. So it might be said parking meters did ease The Parking Problem a bit— by keeping people away. As Ald. Dan Benning, a member of the Traffic Safety Committee, said succinctly and accurately about the parking-meter era, “It didn’t go well.”

Port officials were for a while enamored of a high-tech, whiz-bang digital parking solution promoted by a company the city would pay to install and monitor a pay-for-parking scheme that required drivers to scan a QR code and pay at kiosks for the parking privilege. Fortunately, the plan was dropped when downtown WiFi was determined to be too weak to support it, thus dodging a confusing and irritating turn-off to downtown shoppers.

Past reappearances of The Parking Problem have inspired suggestions that Port Washington should build a multi-story parking structure. This would be tremendously effective—effective at destroying the small-town ambience that is one of Port’s most engaging features. This misbegotten notion has been declared dead on arrival and buried several times, hopefully never to be disinterred.

Traffic Safety Committee members seem to realize there is no way to solve The Parking Problem, but they are not going to let it be said they’re not open to suggestions. So they are apparently giving serious consideration to a proposal by Port Main Street that the city’s public parking lots be named after fish to somehow make it easier to direct visitors to offstreet parking. That would likely mean there would be a Coho Lot and maybe a Rainbow Trout Lot, but probably not a Round Goby Lot.

It’s quite possible that some, if not many, folks view this as silly, but the idea has one redeeming quality—unlike other attempts to deal with the The Parking Problem, it’s harmless. The problem tends to solve itself. Local residents learn to make their downtown trips at times when visitor traffic and parking demand are light. Visitors take parking challenges in stride as a fair price to pay for spending time amid the shops, restaurants, lake views and appealing atmosphere of a pretty town on the seashore. Rather than a bonified problem, The Parking Problem is a reliable measure of the success of efforts to promote downtown Port.

Long live The Parking Problem.