NewUrbanStreets

Houston is well known for pickup trucks and I think one of the things that made some decide to drive one was our “Truck Loading Zones”. The zones were conveniently placed to serve the businesses nearby. But, any truck could park for free. So, the zone were often used by non-delivery trucks and hence did not serve the purpose for deliveries. A control scheme had to be found that provided for deliveries to the businesses in the CBD.

Note – This is a followup article to Trees in the Parking Lane on Dallas St and Leaves Stamped in Concrete.

There is another thing we tried in the Dallas St. project to give it a special urban identity. The traffic engineers–correctly applying the requirements of the traffic control manual–said there had to be a continuous white line between the parking lane (with the trees) and the lane of moving traffic. We have enough of the unappealing look of chipped, ragged thermoplastic stripping and the fading painted stripes. Besides, that is so typical and this street needed to have its own character–like many others in downtown Houston–but with a limited budget.

Our last Mayor, Bill White, and his transportation czar decided a way to increase revenue and improve the service to the public was to exchange the old style parking meters and also new, electronic meters we installed in the Cotswold program in downtown to pay-and-display meters. There are advantages to the new meters but not as many was we were told. The pay-and-display meters came with the new technology of wifi connections so they can take credit card payments. In addition they are inexpensive to install with the solar powered battery recharging system plus other claims that were to offset the high cost per unit.

Many issues were considered when the City of Houston wanted to change parking meters. The change was to be from a mixture of single/dual space meters on a single post along with modern multi-space meters–recently added in the Cotswold area of downtown–to the more sophisticated solar-powered, micro-processor controlled, wifi networked, parking meter. This first post about our conversion relates how we mitigated the issue of the meter’s high-tech appearance in front of a historic structure.  I will offer other posts about the transition as you may be surprised how many hot points can be touched by a parking meter debate.