Arvada’s elected leaders stood on the precipice of implementing paid parking in Olde Town, looked down — and then took several steps back.
After receiving pushback from downtown businesses concerned that would drive away customers, the Arvada City Council decided last week to drop those plans. At least, for now.
“I haven’t had a single resident or business owner tell me they like this,” Councilman Michael Griffith told his colleagues at a council study session on Tuesday. “What are we trying to solve, and who would benefit from paid parking?”
Arvada is the latest Colorado city to grapple with how to maintain the popularity and functionality of its downtown — a tough balancing act that pits efforts to manage vehicle flow against the desires of residents and business owners who want as little friction as possible.
For Debbie Hansen, who has owned La Dolce Vita coffee shop at the corner of Grant Place and Olde Wadsworth Boulevard for 17 years, the city’s decision to hold off on installing parking payment kiosks or meters was welcome news.
“I think it was a good decision that they put it on pause,” she said. “That’s one less thing that I have to stress about with my business.”
Just a few doors down at Outside the Box home decor store, co-owner Dorn Nienaber said paid parking in Olde Town was unnecessary, given the hundreds of parking spaces available in a nearby 600-space garage for the G-Line commuter rail station, known as the Hub, and at a city surface lot — both of which are free.
“People who come here love the small-town feel,” Nienaber said. “Why should they have to pay for parking? It’s a deterrent.”
Popular downtown shopping districts in Colorado have inconsistent policies when it comes to paid parking. Longmont, Littleton and Louisville have kept on-street parking free in their downtowns, though time limits are common.
But elsewhere along the Front Range, Morrison, Golden, Idaho Springs and Manitou Springs have gone the paid route in recent years.
Longtime Arvada Councilman Bob Fifer said his suburban city of 123,000 has grappled for years with parking challenges in Olde Town.
In the past decade, the shopping district northwest of Denver — which sits under an iconic water tower — has exploded in popularity. The Regional Transportation District’s G-Line station debuted in Olde Town in 2019, and the city made a well-used pedestrian-only zone there permanent after the pandemic.
In 2013, Fifer said, the city imposed a two-hour time limit for on-street parking to deal with burgeoning problems at the time.
But making people pay for a spot in Olde Town remains a bridge too far — at least for today.
“Arvada is not ready for paid parking,” Fifer said.
‘Sweet spot’ in efficiency
Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, popularized the theory that when it comes to public street parking, maintaining an 85% occupancy rate is the most efficient use.
Above that rate, he theorized, and drivers are forced to drive around looking for a parking spot, adding to a downtown area’s congestion. Shoup, who died last year, wrote the influential 2005 book
His threshold is one that Kellee Van Bruggen, the transportation planning manager for Arvada, describes as the “sweet spot” for parking efficiency.
“If you’re over 85% and creeping toward 90% (full), it’s not that spaces are totally unavailable — but they are harder to find,” she said.
Not only will drivers circle the downtown grid looking for a recently opened space, they will head into adjoining neighborhoods in search of a free spot — or worse, park illegally in alleys or other places, Van Bruggen said.
According to city data, Olde Town street parking in Arvada often exceeds 85% full, hitting the high 80s at lunchtime and regularly eclipsing 90% in the evenings.
“Olde Town is incredibly popular — people love going down there,” Van Bruggen said.
People also love going to downtown Fort Collins, which just last month delayed a proposal to implement paid street parking.
Despite having nearly 50,000 more people than Arvada, Fort Collins’ elected leaders determined that the time for paid parking in its Old Town Historic District was not now.
Opposition had been growing over the summer, including the launch of that collected nearly 12,000 signatures decrying the idea. The petition claimed that the city’s downtown revitalization effort “is a widely recognized success story — one that was built on creating an accessible and welcoming environment.”
“Introducing paid parking now would undermine decades of work,” the petition stated. “We fear the negative publicity — the perception that ‘now you have to pay to go to Old Town’ — would cause a decline from which our businesses may not be able to recover.”
Mayor Emily Francis said the parking challenge in Fort Collins depended on the day — and the time of day. At 9 a.m. on a Tuesday, she said, “there’s a million spots.”
But getting street parking on a Friday night?
“We see a lot of people circling a lot,” Francis said.
Besides the cost to the driver, which the mayor said would likely have been no more than $2 an hour, the bigger issue is the logistics of parking these days. Mostly gone are the parking meters of old, where a few inserted coins bought a driver an hour.
With digital kiosks and apps that require sign-up or setup, some folks simply don’t want to bother figuring out how to pay for parking, Francis said, especially older people who may not be as familiar with the mobile app world.
Other people just don’t want to pay for what they always got for free, the mayor said.
“For some people, it’s the principle. And for some, it’s the extra steps they’d have to take,” Francis said.
More turnover of parking spots
What often results from free parking, however, is a languid turnover of cars in a popular area. If a motorist doesn’t have to pay, what’s the incentive to move?
That’s what spurred change in Golden.
The city made the move to paid parking in 2013, partly in response to Colorado School of Mines students using the sides of Washington Avenue, Golden’s main street, as a free parking lot, said Nola Krajewski, the president of the Golden Chamber of Commerce.
“There was a need to have some turnover of spaces,” she said.
The resulting paid parking system wasn’t Golden’s first attempt to regulate parking through fees. The city’s leaders proposed installing parking meters as long ago as 1946 — until the chamber dissuaded them from doing so, according to an account on the Golden Today.
The Colorado Transcript newspaper railed against the idea at the time, according to Golden Today: “Phooey on this notion of establishing parking meters on city streets. Citizens are obliged to pay plenty for construction and maintenance of the streets, and itap certainly rubbing it in to ask that they pay extra for the privilege of using them.”
Attitudes have changed. Business owners still grumble about paid parking, but it hasn’t kept the crowds away, Krajewski said, especially those seeking refreshment from tubing down Clear Creek in the warm months.
“Our tourist population in Golden has grown significantly in the last 10 years,” she said.
Golden two years ago, expanding the time window a driver could be charged. The city makes the , with each additional hour costing $2.50, up to a maximum of $10 per day.
Garage is underused
Van Bruggen, Arvada’s transportation planning manager, said Olde Town isn’t necessarily lacking parking spaces overall. They are just not located where people want them.
“Utilization on the street is very high in the peak hours, and usage in the garage is very low,” she said.
After 50 spaces were taken out of commission when the city created the pedestrian zone in response to the pandemic, around 440 on-street spaces remain.
Fifer, who has been on Arvada’s council for 15 years, said the problem with RTD’s parking garage, which has plenty of spaces for visitors to use, is that its availability isn’t readily apparent to drivers.
That’s partly because of design aesthetics. Instead of standing up a giant ugly concrete box at ground level, construction crews built the garage into the hill at the south end of Olde Town — below the G-Line tracks.
“It’s so well camouflaged, people can’t find it,” Fifer said. “We’re trying to find new ways to activate that.”
The garage is also separated from Olde Town by the tracks themselves, making a journey from the garage to the shops less intuitive. Several council members at last week’s study session also talked about a perception that there is a lack of safety and a greater need for law enforcement patrols at the garage.
The city will now focus on improving signage, also known as wayfinding, to make sure people know about these facilities and how to get to them, Fifer said.
“There are some tweaks we have to do before going to paid parking,” he said.
That matters to Heidi Palombi, who was exiting her car from a streetside parking spot on Grant Place last week to pick up a pastry at the Rheinlander Bakery.
The Lakewood resident said having to pay to park to do a quick errand would dissuade her from coming to Olde Town Arvada.
“Sometimes I only stop to get a coffee, and you’d have to pay for an hour,” she said before admonishing Arvada officials against making the wrong call: “Don’t do it. You’re going to lose business.”
