What if we prioritized people and safety on our streets instead of private property storage?

Another reason Harrisonburg should stop mandating and subsidizing private automobile storage.

Harrisonburg won round 3 of the Strongest Town Contest last week. Thanks to everyone who voted. Voting in round 4—the Final Four—begins next Monday, March 31.

A few months ago,

Andy Boenau

wrote about how anyone can design a street using Google Maps and Streetmix, so I decided to give it a try.

I often commute by bike on South Mason Street between two popular destinations: downtown Harrisonburg and JMU campus. Both sides of the street (around 45 percent of the total width) are used for private property storage, which forces people on bikes and scooters to either risk getting doored or take the lane. With so much pedestrian traffic between downtown and the university campus, biking on the sidewalk is not a good or safe option either. There’s designated space for pedestrians, car traffic, and car storage, but no space reserved for bikes and scooters.

For the most part, my bike commutes on Mason Street are conflict-free, but when there are conflicts with cars, it’s not something that is easily forgotten. I’ve been tailgated, honked at, and on one occasion, had a car pass so closely it bent the rearview mirror on my bike. So I chose this portion to redesign using Streetmix.

The width of Mason Street varies, but according to Google Maps’ measuring tool, several sections are approximately 37 feet from curb-to-curb (or 60 feet from the outer edges of the sidewalks). Almost half of the width of the street is used for car parking. Is personal property storage a better use of that public land than protected bike lanes on a street that carries so much pedestrian, bike, and scooter traffic? In terms of public good, public safety, and encouraging low-carbon and active modes of transportation, protected bike lanes are a much better use of that public space than personal property storage.

Here’s one iteration of my experiment with Streetmix: a section of S. Mason Street redesigned with separated bike lanes.

Mason Street is approximately 60 feet between the outside edges of the sidewalks.

All of these elements can be adjusted and rearranged, although certain features are locked in the free version. I wanted to try reconfiguring this with a two-way cycle track on one side of the street, with curb parking on the other side, but the two-way cycle track element is not an option in this free version.

Check out Andy’s instructions and give Streetmix a try yourself.

“But where would people park?”

Discussion of prioritizing safe, active transportation over personal property storage on public land too often devolves into outrage about ending a subsidy that should never have existed in the first place. The questions we should be asking are: what is a more equitable use of that public land? What use best serves the collective public good?

American cities leave millions of dollars on the table when we subsidize and underprice on-street parking. The insultingly low cost of $5 for a residential parking permit in Harrisonburg raises other issues, like off-street parking minimums at apartment buildings being a defacto tax on apartment-dwellers. Any Harrisonburg resident that owns a car is paying personal property tax based on the value of the vehicle, regardless of whether the city is providing subsidized on-street parking, or whether the cost of private off-street parking is bundled into their monthly rent. If one on-street parking permit is truly only worth $5, there should be a mechanism to allow city residents to band together to buy them all out and install a protected bike lane.

At a bare minimum, the cost of the permits should be raised to pay for the administrative costs associated with issuing the permits, as well as the costs of the land and infrastructure maintenance. Any revenue raised beyond the administrative and maintenance costs could be put into a parking benefit district (PBD) fund that would be earmarked for improvements in that specific neighborhood—upgrades such as new sidewalks, street trees, alleyway improvements, murals, or other beautification projects.

We need to internalize these costs that have been externalized for decades. It would be just as ridiculous to demand that the city government pay for everyone’s self storage units as it would be to continue our current parking policies. If we are serious about improving public safety, lowering carbon emissions, making more efficient use of our limited land, and encouraging active transportation, Harrisonburg should stop mandating and subsidizing private automobile storage.

I acknowledge that these are politically unpopular policies among residents who benefit from these subsidies. However, I don’t see a path to better land use that would prioritize abundant housing and a vibrant, walkable city without implementing these changes. I’ll end with a quote from

Henry Grabar

, author of Paved Paradise, who put it like this:

“The core tenet of parking reform, which is rarely highlighted at city council meetings, is that ultimately our communities might be better off if it were a little bit more difficult or more expensive to park in the heart of town. It may need to be so if we hope to build a safer and more convenient environment for non-drivers . . . But first leaders must legalize the type of parking-lite, high-density housing that makes it possible for a neighborhood to be vibrant, walkable, and economically served by mass transit. That’s the beautiful thing about taking away parking: The less of it you build, the less you need.”