On December 9, 2008, the Planning Commission unanimously approved the Conditional Use Permit (CUP) application by Charter Properties to adopt the Shared Parking model for calculating the required number of parking spaces at Phase I of the Promenade. At the time, the majority of the Planning Commission felt that the extreme parking shortage at Dublin Ranch Villages is brought on by the residents alone, but that assessment is incomplete at best. While residents who do not park their cars in the garages are partly to blame, the fact that the developers built up to the maximum of a given density range without regard for basic human behavior also contributes to the challenge. Many of the floorplans in Dublin Ranch Villages feature tandem garages. In a two-car household with a tandem garage, the first person to leave home is usually the first person to come home. Unless both drivers depart at the same time, the first person to take off will invariably park on the street. As the developers came up with innovative designs like tandem garages to cram more units into their high-density projects, they also converted land that should have been reserved for surface-level parking to subdivisions with the City’s blessing. According to former Councilman George Zika, allowing developers to count street parking towards the number of visitor parking as required by Dublin’s Zoning Ordinance is one of the reasons for the “absolutely ludicrous” parking crisis in Dublin Ranch Villages.
Everyone has the right to park on city streets, and current parking regulations do not restrict select groups of the public from parking on the streets at Dublin Ranch Villages. The Home Owner Associations (HOAs) can control those few private parking spaces within their jurisdiction. They can also enforce the rules of the covenants, conditions and restrictions (CC&R) through periodic inspections to make sure residents do not use their garages for storage. The HOAs, unfortunately, simply do not have the legal authority to stop their residents from parking on city streets. To date, no study has been conducted to establish the percentage of residents who refuse to use their own garages. Whether that percentage is more or less than what is observed in neighborhoods with primarily traditional single family homes is also unknown. In addition, the degree to which that percentage contributes to the parking crisis in Dublin Ranch Villages remains undetermined. All planning done in the absence of hard data should, therefore, be considered speculative and not evidence-based. As former Councilman George Zika advised, “the solution is don’t let the problem begin.”
