Downtown Bozeman Parking Study. A Project Completed for the City of Bozeman Parking Commission and Downtown Bozeman Partnership

摘要

The City of Bozeman's downtown district possesses a number of parking resources. These include on-street parking, off-street parking lots, a parking garage, private (business) parking lots and alley parking. The City previously did not have a clear picture of the inventory of these resources; rather, only a general estimate of the number of available spaces existed. Additionally, turnover and occupancy rates for parking were unknown. While a general figure of 3,600 available parking spaces had been compiled by the Citys Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Division, little was known about the distribution of parking resources in the downtown area, their use, and parking use patterns. In light of these questions the City of Bozemans Parking Commission and the Downtown Bozeman Partnership chose to pursue a parking study, the results of which are presented in this report. The study area examined in this report was bordered by Mendenhall St., 5th Ave., Babcock St. and Broadway Ave. on the north, west, south and east sides, respectively. Previous parking studies from comparable communities throughout the U.S. indicated that only limited information related to recommended or expected occupancy rates or similar metrics were available. This came mainly in the form of an 85 percent rule employed in Oregon City, and Springfield, Oregon. The only other baseline metric identified was the criteria that at least 50 percent of available parking assets be controlled or owned by a community. This was viewed as important in order to allow the community to manage parking in terms of allocation, changing demand, pricing, and enforcement.