By Eric Curl
Oct. 1, 2023 – The city of Savannah is seeking a consultant to conduct a study to improve parking south of the downtown’s core.
The request for proposals issued on Aug. 29 is for qualified vendors to update portions of the 7-year-old Parking Matters study, focusing on the area south of Liberty Street to Victory Drive and bounded east and west by East Broad and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
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The city issued the RFP after receiving requests from multiple neighborhood associations in the study area, where most of the parking challenges are now occurring as a result of development, according to Mobility & Parking Services Director Sean Brandon.
“As development has grown in those neighborhoods, this is a natural outgrowth of that development,” Brandon said Friday. “When a new restaurant opens in the area, you get increase in number of people trying to find parking in areas where people have traditionally been able to park.”
The RFP deadline for submissions is Oct. 10 and Brandon said he hopes to have the selected consultant approved by the Savannah City Council in November so the study can begin before the end of the year. At this point, it is too early to say what type of changes could result, Brandon said.
The planned update comes more than six years after the city adopted recommendations from the original Parking Matters study, which included increased rates and extended paid-parking hours that would be enforced on Saturdays on downtown’s north end. The city also invested in new parking meters that accept credit cards and launched a mobile parking app. In addition, the plan included a simplified Dot shuttle system to accommodate parking garage users and individuals who parked further south from prime parking spaces.
The city funded free Dot shuttle, operated by Chatham Area Transit, has since been extended further south to Victory Drive, which Brandon said was also a common request from the neighborhoods. Whether that extension is helping alleviate some of the parking challenges, is not yet known, due to a lack of data, Brandon said.
“People are definitely using it,” he said. “But there is not a lot of data on whether it is changing occupancy on the streets around it and that information would be picked up in the study.”
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