While parking downtown is the subject of endless complaints on social media, Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves said the new parking changes are working as intended based on a year of data collected.
Last year, Pensacola implemented changes that included raising hourly parking fees to a dollar an hour and a new parking payment system through the ParkMobile smartphone app.
“Now, we’ve gotten a pretty good sample size of understanding who our customers are and what’s happening,” Reeves said.
The data shows that only 14% of all parking transactions are from city residents, and the rest are coming from people who do not live in the city, according to Reeves.
When the data is broken down by revenue, 79% of all parking revenue comes from non-city residents, and 21% from city residents.
Reeves has long maintained that increasing the parking rates and stepping up enforcement of parking rules acts as a “user fee” that will result in more infrastructure for downtown, such as planned improvements to Palafox Street or a new downtown parking garage that is being planned.
“As painful as it might be for me, in my inbox and everything else, it is because when it’s time for that $20 million parking garage, when it’s time to reimagine to Palafox Street, when it’s time to do all those things, my choices are, I can put it on the backs of 55,000 people who live here, whether they use downtown or not,” Reeves said. “Or I can try to recoup dollars from people who don’t live here, who don’t pay city taxes, who aren’t investing in that infrastructure, and try to get some revenue generation from those folks that are enjoying downtown.”
Reeves acknowledges that a lot of people claim on social media they’ll never come downtown again, but based on all the data he’s seeing, that’s not stopping people from coming downtown.
“If somebody’s protesting downtown, they’re not telling their cousins or their uncles or whatever, because they’re coming to downtown,” Reeves said. “We certainly don’t have any concern about that.”
Reeves said the number of parking citations has decreased by 6.5% over the year, while the number of parking transactions increased between 20 to 30%.
“That’s real data, not the hyperbole or the anecdotes about one ticket,” Reeves said. “We’re writing less tickets with more (paid) spaces and more, more sessions — way more sessions than we had in June (of last year),” Reeves said.
New Pensacola resident parking permits coming
Reeves announced earlier this year that the city was looking into creating permits for residents, and now that plan is starting to take shape.
Reeves said July 8 that the new permits could come as soon as August, but they’re still working on the details of which permits will be available and how they will work. Reeves confirmed two different types of permits will be issued.
One permit will be for city residents, enabling a 50% discounted parking rate and no transaction fees on the ParkMobile App.
Another permit will be a senior citizen permit for city residents aged 65 and up. Those permits will be a “nominal fee” — though exactly how much hasn’t been decided — which will allow the person to park anywhere in the city for free without having to use the app.
Reeves said he rarely, if it all, has gotten complaints about the cost of parking going up. Reeves said most of the complaints he gets are about the “newness and technology,” mainly centered on using an app to pay for parking. Reeves pointed out there are still pay kiosks at parking locations that take cash and coins, but Reeves said he thinks people are still getting acclimatized to the new parking system.
“I totally get that, and so if we can close the technology delta that causes a lot of confusion or tickets or heartache, and certainly we want to do that,” Reeves said. “That’s really what we’re addressing head-on with the city senior permit.”
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Paid parking downtown Pensacola is working data shows