Columbia conducts audit to address parking issues

It’s been an often-heard complaint for years, residents around downtown Columbia say there are too many cars and not enough parking spaces.

“It’s always super crowded on the sides and you can always see people trying to find parking spots — it’s pretty bad,” said Bianca Smith, an East Campus resident.

Residents in the East Campus neighborhood said they’ve noticed the parking congestion is much worse during the school year. They are not the only ones suffering from parking headaches. According to the city, downtown, Benton-Stephens and North Central also have too many vehicles and not enough places to park them.

“Some of the assumptions are that it’s overflow parking from downtown, but we don’t really know exactly who’s using those spaces, but we just know that there aren’t always enough places for people to park,” said Leah Christian with the city of Columbia.

The city has conducted a parking audit as part of its search for answers to the parking problem. Volunteers gathered data from the affected neighborhoods over a three-day period. They counted the number of cars per block, the number of spaces available and the parking turnover rate. They noted how often vehicles are moving out of the spaces.

They city will use the data collected from the audit to decide how to resolve the parking issues.

The city worked with a company called Smart Growth Consultants to do the audit. Smart Growth will also help analyze the collected data.

The city will hold a community forum at City Hall to present the parking audit results at 6 p.m. on Sept. 22.