Wichita’s downtown parking is a math problem city leaders are struggling to solve.
Wichita has over 6,000 parking spots, divided between metered and free spaces, on streets and in parking garages. Each one brings in about $227 a year but costs about $400 in labor and maintenance.
Complicating the equation is some $9 million of parking improvements that city staff says are waiting in the wings, alongside a new downtown development that’s set to bring thousands more people to the area — mostly by car.
In four of the last six years, Wichita’s parking system has cost more than it’s brought in — often hundreds of thousands of dollars more.
“We’re not generating enough revenue to even keep up with the cost of operating and maintaining the system,” Assistant City Manager Troy Anderson said. “We’ve got to do something different.”
Somebody has to pick up the tab for the deficit in the city’s parking fund.
City leaders say that other communities have a solution — bill the cost of parking to people using the spaces.
In Oklahoma City, Omaha, Des Moines and Topeka, unified pay parking systems made money for taxpayers.
But many business owners in Old Town, Delano and downtown, where the proposed pay parking plan would be put in place, worry about the money going into the meters instead of their registers.
Karla Cumley owns MoonStone, a metaphysical supply store on Douglas Avenue that also hosts meditation classes. Free diagonal parking lines the curb outside her shop. Cumley told city leaders at a presentation to the Wichita Regional Chamber of Commerce recently that pay parking would hurt her business.
Customers “can’t be feeding meters when we have a three-hour class,” Cumley said. “Can you imagine? Stop meditating now. Go feed the meter.”
Facing a public outcry from downtown visitors and businesses, the City Council pumped the brakes on the parking plan.
Council members voted unanimously to pause the purchasing of new parking meters last month in favor of more community conversations. City staff plans to return to the council on Nov. 19 with additional proposals to address the business community’s fears and put the plan back on track.
The road that led us here
The previous City Council adopted the parking plan at the heart of the conversation in March 2023. The work stretches back further — to 15 years of planning to arrive at the decision to ditch free parking in downtown, Old Town and Delano.
In its place? A pay-to-park system that would pay for itself plus the cost of fixing up aging parking garages.
Council members updated ordinances and finalized a management agreement with Idaho-based Car Park earlier this year.
The deal with Car Park started on July 1 and locks the city into a six-year contract with the company to manage and enforce pay parking as well as buy new meter technology. Wichita will pay $9.9 million to the company for managing the system and another $2.3 million for the new meters.
The city planned to roll out the new pay parking at the start of the new year.
All that came to a screeching halt last month. On Aug. 10, the city updated its Facebook page:
“Beginning January 1, 2025, all public parking in the downtown area will convert to paid parking,” the post read. “Come out to the Old Town Farm & Art Market until 1 p.m. today to learn more about the plan!”
More than 1,000 angry comments rolled in. Residents and business owners accused the city of trying to drive customers from downtown enterprises and pull more money from residents. Frustrations poured over into the public information sessions the city hosted in the days and weeks that followed.
During an Aug. 13 City Council meeting, council members officially hit pause, voting to delay the purchase of pay parking equipment until Sept. 10. The council told staff it wanted to hear more public input before moving forward.
Free parking isn’t free?
At public information meetings, Anderson often repeats a mantra: free parking is not free. It’s an idea popularized in the work of Donald Shoup, an economist and urban planning professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Shoup wrote “The High Cost of Free Parking” in 2005. In that book, he argues American cities unintentionally set up complicated and costly parking systems.
“We don’t pay for parking in our role as motorists, but in all our other roles — as consumers, investors, workers, residents and taxpayers — we pay a high price,” Shoup wrote. “Even people who don’t own a car have to pay for ‘free’ parking.”
Money trickles out of residents’ pockets, Shoup wrote, in lots of ways. Renters pay more because developers have to buy extra land for required on-site parking. Residents pay higher property taxes because the city needs to maintain parking.
These increased rents and taxes lead to higher prices in all the goods and services at local businesses.
Anderson said if drivers don’t pay at the meter, the city is left with two other options: either businesses pay for spaces near their properties or the city covers the entire cost of parking through taxpayer dollars.
“We’re already strained on how we’re spending property tax dollars,” Anderson said, “but that will ultimately be a decision of the electeds.”
The pay parking model charges customers a couple dollars at a time instead of large lump sums like property taxes.
The parking meters, Shoup writes, may even be good for business. Parking fees encourage customers to be quick about their business and move on to their next destination. They discourage customers and employees from hogging the best spots and leaving would-be customers cruising for an open spot.
How does pay parking work in other cities?
Hannah Adeponu, the parking and mobility manager for Omaha, buys Shoup’s theories.
Omaha is one of the cities Wichita’s parking plan looks to as a good example.
“If you’re intentional about the way that you plan out your transportation system, your parking system,” Adeponu said, “it can be really beneficial for the community.”
Before 2012, Omaha was a lot like Wichita. Different city divisions managed a patchwork of on-street parking and off-street parking, like garages and parking lots. Omaha was losing money, Adeponu said, because the divisions weren’t communicating well with one another.
In 2012, the city created the parking division and unified the system under one manager. It then launched two studies of its parking, in 2014 and 2020.
The studies found that Omaha had more than enough parking but needed better signs and technology to help people find open spaces.
Today Omaha’s parking ecosystem includes almost 9,000 spaces, Adeponu said, with higher prices in busy areas and lower prices in less crowded spots.
“We actually haven’t seen any real substantial change,” Adeponu said, “as far as behavior is concerned since we moved over to those progressive rates.”
She said that this system brings in between $12 million and $15 million a year and has been self-sufficient since 2014.
Oklahoma City was the first city to install a parking meter starting in 1935 when it added them to commercial streets to respond to shoppers’ complaints about congestion downtown. High-demand spots had meters, but less convenient spots were left free. Merchants and employees took the out-of-the-way spots while customers parked at the meters.
It’s precisely the kind of traffic flow the city hoped to encourage.
Nearly a century later, Oklahoma City has expanded its parking system to include parking garages and app-based parking. In the most recent fiscal year, Oklahoma City made more than $4 million from parking.
Cities are profiting from paid parking, but what about the businesses?
Kent Hymel, a former economist with the U.S. Department of Transportation and assistant professor at California State University, Northridge, looked at how parking meter fees affected sales at two Starbucks in southern California.
Hymel’s study found that higher parking fees increased customer traffic in already saturated areas, but fees kept customers away in areas with lots of available parking.
In contrast, analysts found restaurant sales went up after Seattle extended pay-parking hours in 2011.
“You look at Des Moines, Oklahoma City and Tulsa — all of these cities who employed these (parking) strategies that we’re talking about employing and all are seeing continued success,” Anderson said. “This is not standing in the way of, or hindering or impacting business growth.”
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
