City starts parking study on Galveston Avenue

Bend’s Galveston Avenue corridor is a mix of commercial businesses and residential neighborhoods, making the area increasingly crowded.

Parking is not well understood in the area, and no strategy has been formed for that corridor before. While parking exists at local businesses, much of the overflow spreads into the residential streets.

The Bend City Council tasked certain staff members with studying the area through a data-driven approach. On Tuesday, the public was invited to a city open house to voice their concerns or ideas about what they have seen along Galveston Avenue.

Some of the biggest questions were about the spillover into the neighborhood and how livability will be affected.

“The council heard a couple years ago that there were a lot of concerns about parking around the Galveston corridor, and we really didn’t have any data,” said Karen Swirsky, senior planner in the city’s Growth and Management Department. “We have a lot of stories, a lot of anecdotes, but we didn’t really have any data so the point of this study is to get actual, who is parking where, when, and for how long.”

The consultant for the study, Rick Williams of Rick Williams Consulting, said there has been no definitive look at how the Galveston Avenue parking system works.

“We are going to come in at 3 in the morning and collect license plates in the district,” Williams said. “The assumption is that at 3 in the morning, most of those vehicles are going to be residential vehicles. We then have those license plates and we can track those plates through our study days, so we will be able to compare residential license plates to non-residential license plates.”

Williams said the data will be collected and the study completed by September.