A parking ticket issued in Somerville in December. (Photo: Marc Levy)A proposal to consider lower-cost parking permits for car owners with driveways ran out of gas Monday in Somerville, and on a review of traffic flows and enforcement practices around schools during student drop-off and pickups, city councilors got a clear message: the professionals know the terrain and have the wheel.
“I love the fact that we’re all thinking out of the box,” said Suzanne Rinfret, the city’s director of parking, but the message to officials at the council’s Traffic and Parking Committee was a pretty clear statement that Rinfret, director of mobility Brad Rawson and other staff members were ahead or atop the situations and proposals being brought to them.
On the parking permits issue – discussed in a 2022 curb space study and raised recently by the Somerville Alliance for Safe Streets – councilor Ben Wheeler proposed that lower rates for residents with access to driveways would encourage less street parking, making more of it available for seniors and people with disabilities and ultimately accommodating more housing.
A residential parking permit in Somerville costs $50. (Among the city’s neighbors: In Cambridge, a standard permit costs $75 as of Dec. 1, up from $25; in Medford, a standard permit for a household’s first two vehicles costs $20; Everett charges $10; and Arlington does not have standard parking permits.)
While acknowledging the proposal held additional complexity administratively and in enforcement, Wheeler was “at least partially hoping” that a new kind of permit would encourage compliance because applicants have an “aversion to a headache or to the possibility of tickets.”
Rinfret applied the brakes.
“I honestly don’t see the benefit,” Rinfret said. “It would create a big administrative burden to do something like this,” and the parking study actually suggested charging much more for parking permits for car owners with driveways, not less. “Some people think they shouldn’t even get permits, period.”
Chances are, “you want to park in your driveway anyways,” Rinfret said. “Same with snow emergencies and street cleaning: For the most part, people want to get their cars off the street.”
Getting people to quit cars
The city also already has parking-space programs to accommodate people with disabilities and seeks to create those spaces and loading zones in business districts, she said.
Rinfret believed Wheeler’s proposed change would require hiring more parking enforcement officers – no easy task, and tricky in a moment of tight city budgets – to add to the city’s 28, who now divided into three shifts and are told to prioritize big issues such as ticketing cars parked at hydrants and in bus stops.
The city’s focus is on getting people out of their cars, and that is starting to see success, Rinfret said, to the degree that “we see more tickets for people leaving their cars on the street unattended for over 48 hours.” Those long stays can be ticketed if someone complains.
“If you’re always leaving your car on the street and people are always complaining about it, people eventually go, ’Do I really need this car? Let me just get rid of it, right? Why am I going to pay all this money to have a car that I don’t even use?’” Rinfret said.
If anything, committee chair Naima Sait said, the dual parking permit seemed like something to explore when the city was in better financial shape.
Traffic around schools
The assembled transportation experts also talked through councilor Will Mbah’s concerns about traffic around schools, inspired by his witnessing a traffic incident while he was dropping off his own kids for classes. But as Rawson explained, multiple departments involved with streets, transportation and law enforcement gather monthly for Standing Safe Routes to School coordination meetings that identify trouble spots and how to handle them: deployment of parking control officers and crossing guards, as well as ticketing and sign-hanging to direct parents and kids who walk.
Much of the work culminates in a Safe Routes to School map used by families to navigate Somerville’s streets.
When it came to the biggest recurring problems – construction that changes traffic patterns and certain crossings at McGrath Highway – the city could only react to circumstances, staff said. As construction and its staging moves from day to day, “there’s no institutional function that would be able to solve this complex of a problem all the time for everybody,” said Brian Postlewaite, the city’s director of engineering. “We do have to rely on 311 [calls] and we do have to rely on emails to learn about emerging problems.”
As to McGrath Highway crossings, the route is controlled by the Department of Conservation and Recreation, and attempts to get the state to put crossing guards there have failed, police chief Shumeane Benford said.
“There’s been ongoing dialog between the city by virtue of requests for crossing guards at that location, and they just have not been effective,” Benford said. “There has been multiple and many asks … to my knowledge, it’s been many many years, if at all, since the state has put a crossing guard at that location.”
