The Municipal Services Committee met 03/21/2022. The item that took up the most amount of time was the request to “Approve Parking restriction change on the 1300 block of W. Harris Street (west of Mason Street). Follow-Up to Six-Month Trial Period.”
This request resulted in some impassioned public feedback, and the committee did end up voting unanimously to deny the request to institute traffic restrictions and instead maintain the current level of parking on the street. [I came away from the whole situation feeling like it had been prompted by one, possibly two, somewhat territorial property owners who didn’t want people parking on the public street outside of their house(s).]
Assistant Traffic Engineer Mike Hardy reviewed the memo that had been provided to the committee.
In August of 2021, Alderperson Michael Smith (District 10) had asked to add parking restrictions on Harris Street hear the Mason Street intersection. He had requested that it be restricted on both sides of the street, but staff recommended just restricting it on one side based on the apparent parking need on the street. They conducted a 6-month trial with parking restricted on the north side of the street. When they sent out the information letters to the adjacent property owners, they were contacted by a resident on Mason Street who was outside the area where letters would automatically be sent. They did send a copy of the letter to that person as well, and Traffic Engineer Hardy said that interaction could be taken as an indication that the people choosing to park on Harris Street are not the residents of Harris Street but rather the people who live on Mason Street. Currently, no parking is allowed on Mason Street due to the bike lanes.
At the end of the six-month trial period, Alderperson Smith and the resident of the southwest corner lot expressed interest in adding restrictions to the south side of the street in addition to the north side. Staff conducted several days of assessment and observed that the number of cars that parked on the corner ranged anywhere from 0 to 3 cars, but for the most part there was one vehicle that was parking there. Most of the people that did park on the street seemed to be from a house on Mason Street.
Based on that review, they did not feel that restricting parking on both sides was appropriate and they thought that with parking restricted on only one side, there was adequate room for two cars to maneuver side by side. They were however recommending changing the restriction from the north side of the street, as in the 6-month trial, to the south side of the street. That change would result in the loss of two parking spaces instead of just one but would confer the same benefit in terms of cars being able to more easily maneuver past each other.
Three members of the public, Ellen from Mason Street, Dawn from Harris Street, and Scott (I’m not sure which street he was on).
Ellen talked for over ten minutes, passionately expressing her opposition to this proposal. Boiled down, her concerns were that parking had already been taken away from Mason Street in order to make room for bike lanes. This change would move on street parking options even further way from Mason Street residents. In her own situation, she had to juggle cars in her driveway and was potentially facing a quarter of a mile walk just to move her husbands work van so she could access the vehicle she needed to drive her kids around. Although she was healthy, not everyone was, and she herself had experienced an injury that had temporarily made walking that sort of distance much harder. Additionally, the removal of parking spaces at the corner would result in a chain reaction pushing parking further down the street as other cars grabbed the closest spots to the corner.
Because the “safety” was being brought up as the reason for these parking restrictions she contacted the Appleton Police Department and pulled some statistics on traffic incidents in the area from 2018 up to the present. (She only went back as far as 2018 because she was told it was hard to get anything that was further back.) Over that 4-year time frame there had been only three accidents that happened in that area, one of which was clearly listed as not having happened by the intersection, one of which could have happened anywhere on the 1300 block of Harris Street and was not necessarily by the corner, and only one in February of 2019 that actually clearly happened at the intersection of Harris and Mason. She believed that indicated clearly that there was not a safety issue or concern in that area.
She also looked at the Appleton Police Department Community Dashboard Crime Map and found a total of 7 traffic stops in the area. She confirmed with the police department that those would have been for things such as speeding. She pointed out that it mostly looked like speeders getting pulled over for speeding during the lunchtime hour. She also pointed out that Franklin Street had more traffic stops but no one was talking about doing anything to Franklin Street.
She also disagreed with the idea that residents were “for” these parking restrictions. Although she had not had a lot of time to go canvassing, she had been able to gather signatures of residents who were opposed to the change.
She had also recently seen a City of Appleton employee park their van on Mason Street where no parking was allowed as they tried to contact her Mason Street neighbor, and she thought it was ridiculous that the city would be taking away corner parking from the neighborhood residents when its own employees felt it was too much of a hassle to even go park on the corner.
Dawn on Harris Street also opposed the parking restrictions because it would interfere with her ability to juggle cars in her driveway and additionally her mom had health issues and was on oxygen and she would not be able to park in front of Dawns house when visiting if these changes were made permanent.
Scott also expressed opposition to the parking restrictions and was upset that he had received a parking ticket.
Alderperson Smith was the alderperson for the district this intersection was located in. He said the issues Ellen had brought up lined up with the concerns that had been brought up 10 years ago when parking had been removed from Mason to make room for bike lanes. The Council room at that time had been filled with people begging, pleading, and crying for Council to not approve the bike lanes for the issues that Ellen was now experiencing.
At the same time, Alderperson Smith was in favor of implementing the parking restrictions on Harris Street. A constituent had contacted him about it and the street did become very narrow, particularly during the winter with the snow, when cars were parked at that intersection. He did support changing the restriction from the north to the south side of the street because the snow plow had been plowing in the vehicle that parked on the corner of Harris Street which made it hard for the resident who lived there to clear their snow. [I didn’t really understand the dynamics of that or what the reasoning was behind the city showing special favoritism to that one specific homeowner vs any other homeowner or car parker who would be affected by changing which side of the street had restrictions.]
He said that a majority of the people he had talked to were in favor of the parking restrictions and did not oppose moving the side of the street they were on.
He said he empathized with Ellen and noted that, at the time the bike lanes were installed, the supporters of the bike lanes had made comments that it should be no problem for people to park and walk around the corner and that it would be healthy, but now they were having problems that were a direct result of the bike lanes. He understood her situation but he was also concerned about the people that lived on Harris Street and the safety issues with that intersection.
Alderperson Denise Fenton (District 6) said she saw there were two letters in the agenda packet from residents opposing the restrictions. She asked how many residents had requested the parking restrictions.
Alderperson Smith answered that the request came from one constituent who lived on the corner.
Alderperson Fenton said, “So essentially we had a request from one person that resulted in the trial change. We’ve got two people who were against it in our materials. We’ve had three people testify against it. I’m just trying to get a count for my head.”
[That count wasn’t exactly accurate. Ellen, who had also spoke in person, had provided one of the written responses. The other written response was a little unclear but didn’t seem to be opposed to the restrictions but rather to moving the no parking sign to the other side of the street. The person who sent that email was located on the north west corner of the street, while the person who had made the initial complaint to Alderperson Smith and also requested that the restrictions be moved to the south side of the street. Basically, it sounded like two residents who didn’t want people parking in front of their houses.]
Alderperson Chad Doran (District 15) said, “I’m still confused as to what the actual problem is that we’re trying to prevent here.” The number of accidents at that intersection was not concerning. “Is it really just boiling down to one resident that’s concerned about parking in front of one house?” What problem were they trying to solve with the parking restrictions?
Alderperson Smith reiterated that when cars are parked on both sides of the street, Harris Street gets very narrow. There’s also increased traffic in the area during school pick-up. Removing parking on one side would widen the intersection up enough so that cars could move in both directions down the street more safely than when vehicles are parked on both sides of the street near the intersection.
Alderperson Brad Firkus (District 3) asked if there was anything about the size of the street or intersection that was different than the other residential streets that abutted Mason Street.
Traffic Engineer Eric Lom responded that the side street situation was typical for the streets along Mason Street and noted that when they took up the request “we wanted to be careful that we didn’t set a precedent that we couldn’t live with. And there are dozens of other cross street intersections—or cross streets rather—up and down Mason Street, and many other streets, that have these similar issues.” Regarding the residents on Mason Street having no alternative but to park on the side streets he said, “We knew back in 2010 when the bike lanes were approved that this—these were gonna be things that we were going to need to deal with down the line. It was talked about explicitly.”
Wanting to address the “safety” issue, he said that often they are caught between a rock and a hard place. If they don’t address things residents come to meetings and ask how many accidents have to happen before the city does something? On the flip side, if they do something before accidents happen, they get the response they were getting during that meeting which was residents asking why they were doing something when nothing had happened.
Based on the issues that Alderperson Smith had brought to them, the recommendation they were bringing to the council was a best practice.
Ellen took issue with that and pointed out that in their own memo they stated “During the trial, several vehicles belonging to Mason Street residents were routinely parked on Harris Street, with demand ranging from 0 to 3 vehicles parked at any given time. Most of the time, there was one or zero vehicles parked.” She thought that indicated that there was less of a safety risk there because residents themselves didn’t want to keep their vehicles there longer than what was needed.
She went on to argue that lack of parking would lead to property values going down which would mean fewer tax dollars. [It wasn’t particularly convincing, but I appreciated her willingness to throw all her arguments out there in the hopes that at least some of them would stick.]
Alderperson Doran asked if there were other neighborhoods with parking restrictions like this.
Traffic Engineer Lom answered that off the top of his head he wasn’t sure if there were any restrictions specifically related to the bike lanes on Mason Street. This one may have been the first one they deal with. He did note that restrictions like this were a common practice around schools because of the congestion and parking pressure that is present because of the schools.
Alderperson Doran asked if the problems in the neighborhood were heavier in the morning and afternoon around pickup and drop-off times.
A staffer responded that during the trial he had seen only one time where a parent pulled into the restriction area and sat there for 15 minutes waiting for their child to get out of school. Beyond that, he had not seen much school activity. He added that a lot of times, these types of parking restrictions were for places that had more continuous parking problems. He pointed to a street off of Wisconsin Avenue which had businesses on the corner, and those businesses were resulting in people parking on the corner close to Wisconsin Avenue. In the end, they restricted parking on both sides of the street for two car lengths off of Wisconsin.
Alderperson Fenton asked if this change would have been contemplated if Alderperson Smith had not contacted the traffic department with a complaint from a resident.
A staffer responded, “I do not believe this is something we would [have] initiated if we would have gone through on our own. It might have been observed, but I do not know if this is something we would have initiated.”
Alderperson Joe Prohaska (District 14) stated he would vote against implementing the restrictions. There were multiple people opposed to it and only one person for it. He understood the concept behind the restrictions, but if that held true, they would be looking to do the same thing on Franklin and Washington Streets because they had the same situation.
A staffer clarified that there were actually two residents who were in favor of the restrictions and each of them had wanted those restrictions to be on both sides of the street.
Alderperson Smith told the committee, “I’m still gonna ask that this gets supported.” Allowing parking in that area meant people had to deal with their garbage containers getting blocked in by snow. In a very disjointed way that I didn’t follow he recounted the story of a resident who had been recovering from surgery and was in some way inconvenienced by a Mason Street resident parking their car in that area. He reiterated that the street got very tight when vehicles were parked on both sides, particularly if they were larger vehicles.
Alderperson Alex Schultz (District 9) who was not on the committee but was there for a different agenda item said he didn’t have a vote but his preference would be to keep the parking restriction on the north side which would remove only one parking spot instead of moving it to the south side which would take away two.
That tied in nicely with Alderperson Doran’s question. He wanted to know why the recommendation had been moved from the north side to the south side. Didn’t having the restriction on the north side accomplish the same thing?
A staffer answered, “I believe the north side achieves the same. I believe it was just a preference in discussion with Alderperson Smith and the feedback that we did receive from the resident that lived on the south side.”
Before they voted Alderperson Firkus said it felt like a pretty normal intersection and he felt comfortable voting against the restrictions. It seemed like a situation they could continue to monitor but they needed to be sensitive to the issues caused by the bike lanes being there. “We want bike lanes in our community so that we have that kind of option of transportation through the community, but the trade-off has to be that the side streets have to be available for parking for the people that live on these roads then.”
The committee then voted 5-0 against implementing the recommended parking restrictions.
[I think the committee made the right call. There didn’t seem to be a compelling reason for the change. If the restrictions had been approved and I had been a Mason Street resident, I would have been very angered that the city first took away the parking on the main street and then went on to take away parking on the side street as well. The vibe I got was that the property owners of the two corner houses just didn’t want to share the street outside their homes with their neighbors; although, maybe I’m being unfair with that assessment.]
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=922398&GUID=2DB50860-BE87-4E46-961C-5DAFB0360FDC
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