WILMINGTON — The City of Wilmington has roughly three square miles of surface parking in the city making up about 6 percent of the total land area — that’s a lot of parking spaces. In fact, it comes out to roughly 335,000 spaces, four spaces per registered car in the city.
On Monday, City Council took a look at the city’s current parking requirements for businesses and residences in an attempt to “right size” the current regulations.
Providing adequate parking for a rapidly growing city is an important task, but do the city’s requirements match up with national trends and the city’s own comprehensive plan?
Sometime in the 1960s, communities began requiring minimum parking standards in order to provide enough space for the number of vehicles — but there was no set standard on which these minimums were based, Assistant Planning Director Ron Satterfield said. A lot of the time these numbers were inflated to account for the peak business, but not everyday traffic.
The City of Wilmington has 2,768 acres of surface parking lots. Satterfield said what he finds that interesting is that the acreage of blacktop and concrete is three times more than the total area of parks and greenspace — only 754 acres.
For the Wilmington comprehensive plan, an overarching theme is to bring services to people and bringing people to services according to Satterfield. Three policies of the comprehensive plan include: minimize surface parking, encourage shared parking, and optimize the capacity of existing parking facilities.
While having enough parking for expected capacity is important, there are plenty of retail locations with perhaps too much parking. For example, Satterfield showed a photo of the Wal-Mart Supercenter off Market Street.
The store itself is 230,000-square-feet which, according to city, requires a minimum of 575 parking spaces and a maximum of 1,150 spaces; the store constructed 950 spaces, on the high end.
In the above photo, the parking lot is about 34-percent occupied with 312 vehicles in the parking spaces.
Satterfield conceded he did not know exactly when the photo was taken showing only 312 cars but did have multiple photos from the busier summer months showing similar scenes with the back portion of the parking lot vacant.
Benchmarking
In an effort to get a better feel for parking standards across the state and country, city staff compared Wilmington to 15 different cities. Of those, there is a growing trend of reducing parking requirements for all types of developments.
For the most part, the reduction in minimums and even the outright elimination of minimum requirements is seen in downtown districts, Satterfield said.
That is consistent with Wilmington’s current requirements which actually do not have minimums for the Central Business District.
Some of the suggestions Satterfield offered City Council to help “right size” the parking standards include:
- Eliminate parking minimums
- Reduce parking maximums
- Count on-street parking towards minimum parking requirements
- Require shared-parking
- Plan for bike and other modes of transportation
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