There’s no relief for on-street parking coming from Cambridge’s public school parking lots, even as a city report shared last week suggests tougher times ahead for drivers as city officials and staff try to balance the needs of a growing population.
Recent policy and street design changes “have put further pressure on street parking,” said a report from city staff, including transportation commissioner Brooke McKenna, that signaled more changes – to meet climate and transportation goals including shifting people away from driving alone; more use of electric cars; and urban design that gets people “closer to life’s necessities so it is easier to forgo a car trip.”
City councillors on Monday sent the issue onward toward a transportation committee hearing, thanking staff for the balanced approach. “ I really appreciated the reality check,” councillor Cathie Zusy said of the report.
It went over less well with some drivers. Along with an affirmation from city staff that resident parking permit will go to $75, speakers came to speak to the council of a “war on cars.”
“The council’s foundational belief that cars represent a luxury good or convenience rather than a daily necessity has to change,” Joe Adiletta said, sketching out his needs raising four kids and bitterness over the council’s “implied assault on personal property rights.” Resident Kiril Alexandrov went further to criticize the policies as hostile to lower-income residents and why “my family and I risked our lives escaping from a Communist country in 1970 that did exactly this type of rationing rather than creating abundance.”
More mildly, John Pitkin suggested that project staff should make adopt a standard of looking at how long it takes to find a parking space, but Buchanan Ewing warned councillors that there is a significant voting bloc of drivers who are “waking up” to the realization that “the immense impending stress of on-street parking is just starting.”
A need for cars
Councillors and staff agreed that there were uses, and a need, for cars. “We do recognize that these are issues that really impact people’s lives,” McKenna said, which is why the report should be considered “just as the jumping-off point for this conversation.”
Similarly, there will be a one-year review of the parking permit increase from $25. (Any driver can get a permit for free if they indicate that the cost is a hardship. Anyone with a disability placard or plate is automatically exempt.)
Other policies drew extended pro-and-con discussion in staff’s Wednesday report, including not allowing permit purchases to residents in new buildings in transit-rich areas; capping the number of resident parking permits issued each year; and limiting the number of resident parking permits to one permit per individual.
Rationale for change
There was urgency to the conversation because “projects are going up right now,” councillor Patty Nolan said, and it is only increasing pressures when there’s growth in density and the number of homes with anyone thinking a multiplying number of residents will find parking on the street.
Instead, vice mayor Burhan Azeem said, “it’ll be a fantastic thing to say ‘I know that three-unit building next to you is getting replaced one with 15, but actually there’ll be more parking available because they won’t be eligible for a parking permit – so actually parking will be easier for you with that new development, rather than the other way around.’”
Even if drivers have complaints, Cambridge is on reasonably solid legal ground in its proposals, the report said. Courts have found that the city can “create classes of parking permits so long as the classes rationally further a legitimate state purpose,” and it counts to cite “the reduction of traffic congestion and air pollution and the encouragement of the use of public transportation.”
Looking for lost spaces
Cambridge has been adding bike lanes citywide for the past decade, which often removes parking spaces because only so many uses can fit on old, narrow streets. The city ended parking minimums on construction in a vote on Oct. 24, 2022, that also let residents and property owners rent out parking spaces they aren’t using. A plan for reuse of unused commercial lot spaces adopted Dec. 23, 2024, hoped there could be as many as 3,400 off-street parking spaces freed up around 45 “flexible parking corridors” to replace the loss of 800 to 900 parking spaces to bike lanes. It’s been hard to get numbers for parking space reuse from the city, though, and the update to the city’s Parking and Transportation Demand Management Ordinance hasn’t been touted as a big success.
In a blow to drivers and parkers, staff said shared parking doesn’t seem to be forthcoming from the school district either. “It does not seem like there is a path forward to make school parking available” to residents outside school hours, a report said, citing safety concerns, though there could be occasional parking “for particular events or occasions.”
In addition to safety concerns, a short report from school district chief operating officer Damon Smith said shared use is simply too complex and that the parking is in use beyond school hours. The lots “see consistent high usage throughout both the day and evening,” Smith said. Shared use could “interfere with core school operations.”
Community call went unanswered
The answer was despite residents asking in community meetings a decade ago for shared parking to be a consideration in the city’s giant school construction projects – the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School/Putnam Avenue Upper School that opened in late 2015 costing $95.5 million; the King Open/Cambridge Street Upper School & Community Complex, which opened in 2019 with 105 parking spaces for a total $160 million; and the Tobin Montessori/Darby Vassall Upper School that opened last year with a 150-space garage, costing a total $299 million.
The Cambridge Street project eliminated an accessible surface lot with 55 spaces to install an underground garage residents can’t use, despite parking being “a top concern for residents,” a city spokesperson noted before construction.
“I understand the rationale, and yet I’m quite disappointed,” Nolan said, noting that Boston schools allow neighborhood use of its parking facilities. “It is a disappointment that we didn’t have the foresight to design these new facilities in a way to better account for community access.”
“We could have done this”
There was no lesson learned from Cambridge Street about designing the Tobin and Darby Vassall structure for neighborhood use, Nolan said.
“It was not good planning, it was not good foresight. This is a public building, this is a public lot,” Nolan said. “We could have done this.”
Because there was an election in November, it was not the current School Committee that reviewed the parking issue. Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui said the topic could go back for review – a subcommittee took up the issue more than a year ago on June 12, 2025, despite the outcome just now emerging – but deputy city manager Kathy Watkins suspected not much would change.
Staff visiting the parking garages “sort of went into it thinking like, oh, people are being maybe overly conservative,” Watkins said. They came away “somewhat surprised by the impact of being there in the space.”
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