June 2021 Community Conversations

Understanding How Citizens Visit Downtown Harrisonburg and Evolving to Fit their Needs

Authored by Eric D. Campbell, City Manager, City of Harrisonburg

We should have been having this conversation a year ago. Smoothly moving from public engagement, to completing a study, to implementation would have been the preferable course of action. But sometimes pandemics get in the way of your best laid plans and turn a one-year project into a two-plus effort.

That is the case with our Downtown Parking project. But through ingenuity and a dedication to community engagement which is at the heart of all our projects in The Friendly City, we are successfully nearing the end of a project that will make life better for all who live, work and play in Harrisonburg’s Downtown.

We first decided to take a closer look at who visits our Downtown and how they do so back in spring of 2019. We knew that researching the past and present of parking, walking and bicycling in the heart of our city would be vital to planning for its future. What we found was a varied group: residents who lived in the Downtown core; employees who worked at area businesses and needed adequate parking for their full shift; people who wanted to be Downtown all day shopping or just for 10 minutes picking up dinner; families looking to visit our two Downtown parks, the library or the children’s museum; bicyclists running Grub Hub deliveries or just looking to pass through; and so many more.

We knew such a diverse group of visitors would require an equally diverse group of ideas to improve their visit to Downtown, and ultimately make it easier to live, work and play there. Our Downtown is unique, being home to Virginia’s very first Culinary District and benefiting from a detailed approach to beautification and walkability from our Public Works team, so a one-size-fits-all plan would not be sufficient.

Thus, the study began in June 2019. City staff began the heavy lift of a parking spot census – determining where each location was throughout Downtown, who owned them, who was allowed to park there (and when), and to map that so we could understand the big picture.

What we found was eye opening. We knew how many parking spots we had – the majority of which are housed in two, two-level parking decks – but what we weren’t fully aware of was how many parking spots in our Downtown weren’t accessible to most residents. Some 70 percent of parking spots – or 5,525 spaces – were private, off-street spots. Another 202 spaces were reserved, on-street spaces, leaving us with only 27 percent of all parking spots in Downtown to work with in order to help our residents and visitors.

Working with our consultant, DESMAN, we began the process of understanding how well that 27 percent (roughly 2,175 spots) was being used, and if there were changes we needed to consider to make those spots more efficient while helping Downtown businesses. Key to that was community engagement, in what turned out to be one of our largest engagement processes the City had ever conducted.

That started with stakeholder meetings with property and business owners in the Downtown core. More than 50 property owners engaged with the City, explaining their experiences with parking Downtown and highlighting what they would like to see happen in the future. That was followed by the first of our public forums, where an additional 25 people came out to hear the very beginnings of our plan to improve their Downtown visits. 

Little did that prepare us for the flood of interest that followed. More than 1,100 residents took part in a survey that covered their experiences, concerns and expectations with Downtown parking, providing us at the time with the most community engagement our Public Works team had ever received on a project.

Those responses provided us with the second piece of eye-opening news concerning the parking situation facing us. Nearly 90 percent of Downtown visitors said they used public parking (remember, only 27 percent of our Downtown spots are open to the public). And, of those 1,100 residents, nearly 75 percent only parked for four hours or less.

For a City that has 480 10-hour parking spots, but no four-hour spots, a clear disconnect was evident right away. On top of that, residents said in mass that our multitude of parking options – 12 different zones in total – was just too confusing for someone looking for a spot Downtown.

With those results in hand, DESMAN provided us numerous options to fix our Downtown parking for the future – with a key proponent being to offer the parking that residents actually wanted: nearly 500 four-hour spots. To do that, the City decided to do away with some 350 10-hour spots that were mostly going unused. We also opted to add more than 200 permit spots for those who wanted to guarantee access to long-term parking.  

Now, residents were engaged. More than 100 people came out to the next public forum, where we discussed potential parking changes, and another 300 people took part in a second survey letting us know they were in support of many of the changes we were looking to make. We presented these results to our City Council, let them and the community know we were ready to move forward, and started planning to revitalize parking in Harrisonburg for the next decade.

That was in April 2020. You know what came next.

The pandemic slammed the brakes on our parking efforts – as well as most other things – and we set the plan on the back burner knowing the momentum and community interest would melt away the longer the pandemic dragged on. Restarting that interest, and encouraging buy-in once the project re-emerged, would take careful planning.

Which brings us to today. And, as we expected, residents have mostly forgotten the parking study and the changes so many were excited for.

So, we had to think outside of the box. How do you remarket a project that took many months of effort with only a few weeks to make it happen? The answer: listening.

The City scheduled three meetings, open only to Downtown property owners, inviting them to come meet one-on-one with City staff to see every change we planned on making and to allow them to provide feedback they had about how it would impact them. 

We also created a brand new webpage just for Downtown parking, including an interactive map showing residents exactly where they are allowed to park. New, attention-grabbing signage is going up in parking lots and decks reminding residents that changes are coming, and asking them to follow a QR code to learn more about where they can park in the coming weeks. Businesses are being asked to help us get the word out – sharing flyers in their restaurants showing the closest parking spots to their establishment and posts on their social media pages. A full-court-press media engagement plan was worked out, bringing individual media outlets to our facility to go over the presentation just with them one at a time, answering every question we could and connecting them with business leaders who could talk about how the changes would benefit their bottom line.

Ultimately, we believe the new four-hour spots will better accommodate visitors to our Downtown and help get more customers, more quickly, to our businesses. Without our strenuous community engagement efforts, we would never have realized what the real issue was with Downtown parking, and we would never have been able to get everyone back to the table after a year of COVID-19 forcing our public forums to Zoom.

To discuss this concept further or ask questions contact Eric Campbell.