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SA Page 19 UNDERSTANDING PARKING REQUIREMENTS IN GENERAL Who is Responsible for Providing Parking? Most people look to their local governments to provide ample downtown parking. Technically, however, the responsibility to provide parking in all areas of the City falls on the private property that generates the need for the parking in the first place. Article 30, Section 1 of the Redwood City Zoning Ordinance says... 30.1 Purpose. The purpose of this article is to require that all uses of land in the City which normally terminate or generate vehicle trips provide on that land. or reasonably close, adequate space on which to park and load the vehicles involved, in order that the public streets may be used primarily for the movement of traffic and not the storage of vehicles. (Ord 1130. eft. 7-10-64: Ord 1130.272, eft. 11-15-90) How do Parking Reauirements Work? Parking requirements apply to new business and new buildings that are created in cities. They set out a formula for determining the minimum amount of parking a business or building must create before it can open. Parking requirements usually have a list ~f land use categories. Each land use category has a different minimum required number of spaces based on how many cars it is expected to bring to the area. Some zoning codes have a small number of land use categories, other have dozens and dozens ofland use categories. Redwood City has 29. Each land use category has a specified unit of measurement that the parking requirement is based on. The unit of measurement is based on a characteristic of the land use. The most common is floor area. Sometimes seats, hospital beds, gas pumps, or other such things are used as the unit of measurement. Parking requirements also have to deal with geography. To what places do these requirements apply? Some cities, such as Redwood City, have one set of requirements that apply to the entire city. Other cities have different requirements for each zoning district. C-1 might have one set of requirements, while C-2 has another, for example. Other cities have one set of requirements for suburban parts of the city and another for the downtown. In Bellevue, Washington, for example the standard minimum parking requirement for restaurants outside of their downtown is 14 spaces per 1,000 square feet of floor area while in their "Downtown 0-1" zone there is no minimum requirement at all. "P:'I~e 12 -.". , .---. '-~'--'-'-"--"--- ...-..-.,.---- ." --..-...".--.. '~'-'--'--~------'-,--~-----_.