Article by Luis Barrio Laredo,Tx. ( KGNS) -In an online community survey focusing on parking in the downtown area, Laredoans seemed to favor more parking spots being available over other things such as cost or how close it might be to a particular destination.
Based on the data from the study, officials came to the realization that they should increase the price to park at some of the downtown meters, which is something they made effective on Friday.
This goes all the way back to the City of Laredo Comprehensive Plan Viva Laredo, which outlines the master plan for revitalizing the downtown area.
That plan now includes a fifty-cent increase to stay for an hour.
The city contracted a company back in 08 to take a look at the downtown parking situation.
A 92 block area with 6,300 spaces was studied, broken down into public off-street spots like parking garages, private off-street spots and on-street parking, those with meters.
Their findings convinced the city that bumping up parking meter rates on 500 of those spots, mostly in the downtown area will make more people visit downtown.
The city wants more turnover. Since these are public spots, they do not want the same car taking up the same space all day.
Danny Magee with the City of Laredo says they wanted to make the parking spaces more available to the public instead of having one car there all day. The parking rates for that area were 75 cents an hour and it’s much less than the parking lots around town which average about two dollars per hour.
Parking meters are already updated and now it will cost 50 cents more to stay for an hour.
The final report noted that adding a parking website would help increase people’s understanding of the downtown parking situation.
The city has received numerous complaints about people parking their car overnight and walking over to Mexico.
The study’s primary takeaway is that a more vigorous parking management program needs to be pursued.It does not need additional spaces.
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