The city zoning ordinances that require businesses to provide off-street parking have not been revised since 1963, the same year the Massachusetts Turnpike was being constructed through Newton, when cars ran on leaded gasoline that cost around 30 cents per gallon.

A lot has changed since then. These parking requirements have not. Today, they serve to repel new business and hamper existing businesses that wish to expand. [Read more →]

For all of the concerns voiced this year about parking meter rates and parking enforcement, the city has far more important parking issues to address. For starters, as a city, we need to make it easier for businesses, especially restaurants, to open in our village centers.

Today, almost every village center has vacant storefronts. Granted, these are difficult economic times, and the cost of a commercial lease in Newton presents no small challenge. While the city has no control over these market factors, our zoning ordinances do present an effective barrier to entry: outmoded parking laws that require businesses to provide off-street parking.

Don Levy (left), with his lawyer Michael Field, offers a slice of coconut pie at the Deluxe Town Diner in Watertown.

Of all village businesses, restaurants really take it on the chin. [Read more →]

The developers of the Riverside T station have rescheduled the community meeting that was recently canceled.  The next meeting will be held on Thursday June 17, 2010 at 7:00 p.m. at the Williams school.  (Map & directions here.)

This meeting will benefit from the recently released traffic study completed by the developer’s consultant, VHB.

For more information, visit http://www.riversidestation.info, the site of the Riverside Station Neighborhood Coalition:  the Lower Falls Improvement Association, the Lasell Neighborhood Association, and the Auburndale Community Association.

Newton is working hard on refining its parking enforcement practices (see this in the TAB and this in the Globe).  We’re also thinking quite a bit about supply, particularly in Newton Centre:  development applications for Panera and more recently the train station diner hinged on parking supply questions.  And who hasn’t heard about dreams of parking garages in Newton Centre to get the parking out of the triangle at Beacon & Centre?

To their credit, a handful of aldermen have also tried to reform some parking regulations.  Last year, there was a short-lived attempt to create a pilot program for combined employee/residential permits on some streets near business districts.  Also in 2009, an item to reduce parking requirements for restaurants was docketed, but it was never discussed.  The most important reform, however, is still under consideration:  an in-lieu-of-parking fee system. [Read more →]

The interior of the proposed Deluxe Station Diner as drawn by Joseph D. LaGrasse & Associates Inc. of Andover. (Click to enlarge.)

[UPDATE: April 28, 2010--The Board of Aldermen approved the Deluxe Station Diner's special permit in a 20-0 vote last week. The diner's owners hope to have the restaurant open early this summer.]

Aldermen on the city’s Land Use Committee voted 8-0 Tuesday night in favor of approving the special permit that would enable the owners of Watertown’s Deluxe Town Diner to open in the vacant Newton Centre “T” Station at 70 Union Street.

Committee members questioned the landlord, who leases the building from the MBTA, representatives of the city’s planning department, and the diner owners about the availability of parking, removal of trash and recycling, noise, and the possibility of the diner offering customers take-out windows on Union Street and on the train platform.

Committee members also expressed interest in maintenance plans for the building’s exterior and improvements for the landscape around the station. The station itself was designed by H.H. Richardson (Wikipedia entry), the architect who designed Trinity Church (photos) in Boston’s Copley Square. The landscape of the Newton Centre “T” Station was originally designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed Boston’s Emerald Necklace. [Read more →]

(Just kidding: don’t skip LEED; just don’t stop there, either!)

Newton’s parking policy, and problems with it, was one of the main action areas that came out of our work planning meeting at the end of January. We talked about how zoning regulations require that restaurants provide on-site one new parking space for every three seats on the restaurant floor, no matter where the restaurant is located in the city: in a train station, with great transportation options, or on Route 9, where there are none. That doesn’t make sense, and we’re working on changing that.

Our argument against these parking standards comes from our passion for village vitality. A recent article from one of the nation’s premier transportation gurus attacks minimum parking standards from another tack: they are environmentally unsound. [Read more →]