It took another year for Public Works to craft a detailed plan outlining where and when overnight parking would be available and how it would be enforced. Last October, the department presented that plan to the City Council's Land Use, Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. It called for allowing overnight parking between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. in the area bounded by Broadway/Lincoln, Speer Boulevard, I-25 and Colfax Avenue.
From 10 p.m. until 2 a.m., parking would cost $1 an hour. From 2 a.m. until 6 a.m., it would cost 50 cents, and it would be free between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. So the total cost to park overnight would be $6. However, before 10 p.m., the city's so-called hundred-foot rule would still be in effect. Downtown, the rule requires people who park before 10 p.m. to move their cars one hundred feet after two hours in an attempt to ensure "turnover" at meters so people don't hog the good spots. Even if a person parked at 9:30 p.m., they'd be required to move their car within two hours.
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Public Works has added stickers to meters in an attempt to clear up confusion.
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Matt Wager and Cindy Patton of the city's Department of Public Works helped craft the overnight parking system.
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As for street sweeping, Public Works figured out a schedule in which it could sweep one side of the street on Mondays and Wednesdays and the other side on Tuesdays and Thursdays, keeping at least one half of the street open for overnight parking at all times. There is no sweeping on the weekends.
City council members had few questions. The final vote, on December 20, 2010, was unanimous. To allow cars to park overnight for up to ten hours, the council deleted a provision from a city ordinance that prohibited parking in one spot for more than five.
Three months later, on March 21, then-mayor Bill Vidal, along with other city dignitaries and Public Works officials, gathered to announce that overnight parking would start that day with the replacement of street parking signs and meter stickers at 17th and Wynkoop streets. Over the next few months, 2,977 of the city's more than 5,000 parking meters were given a makeover; the cost to implement the overnight program was $65,000. To ease the transition, Public Works waited two weeks after each round of replacements to start enforcing the overnight rules.
Still, for some parkers, especially those "taking advantage of the amenities downtown" on a Friday or Saturday night, the makeover proved baffling.
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When a Denver resident receives a parking ticket he thinks is bogus or unfair, he can visit the Denver County Court Parking Magistrate's Office, located through the metal detector and past the indoor Subway restaurant in the Wellington E. Webb Municipal Office Building. There he takes a number from a bulbous red ticket dispenser of the variety usually found at deli counters and has a seat to wait for the next available magistrate.
The five magistrates, city employees blessed with the magical power to reduce or dismiss parking tickets at their discretion, sit behind high desks in tiny hearing rooms as citizens make their case. On any given day, they hear a litany of complaints and excuses ranging from "A tree branch was blocking the No Parking sign" to "I had my up-to-date license-plate tags; I just forgot to put them on." Increasingly, people come equipped with cell-phone photos of broken meters or confusing signage. Occasionally, someone starts shouting. But for the most part, people are nice. Some go so far as to call the magistrates "Your Honor," even though they aren't really judges.
Starting in April, the magistrates began seeing people perplexed about the new overnight parking rules. "It was more about people coming in here who were not familiar with it," says office supervisor Roberta Munoz. "They didn't know it had changed."
The number of people disputing tickets rose after overnight parking went into effect. According to Munoz, 3,517 people visited a magistrate in March, the month the city began changing the meters. In May, the number jumped to 3,927. In June, it increased even more, to 4,320. July saw a dip to 3,683, which Munoz attributes to vacations, holidays and furlough days. In August, the number was back up to 4,293.
But she cautions that it's impossible to know whether the increases are due to overnight parking. The office doesn't track the types of tickets people dispute, just the overall number of visits. Plus, she says, her office has seen steady increases for years, a trend that could be attributed to the lagging economy. In 2008, 28,112 people disputed a ticket. In 2009, the number spiked to 34,256, and in 2010, it rose again, to 40,129.
In fact, Munoz believes that the number of people disputing overnight parking tickets has dropped off in the past month as more people become aware of the new rules. "We educate people about the change," she says.
On a recent weekday, that seemed to be the case. Of the hundred or so people who came through the office in a span of four hours, only two were there about overnight parking. Tyler Wyckoff, 27, showed up around 12:30 p.m., clutching two yellow ticket envelopes. "I got a couple of violations last week," he told the magistrate, the first at 12:33 a.m. at a meter near the Ginn Mill, around Larimer and 20th streets.
