WaPo: "District residents can apply for free visitor parking passes"

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District residents can apply for free visitor parking passes

By Mike DeBonis, Published: August 11

District residents living in the city’s densest and most parking-scarce neighborhoods will soon be able to apply for a free visitor parking pass, D.C. transportation officials announced last week. The surprise move has raised neighborhood concerns about possible abuse and further erosion of curbside parking for city residents.

In recent years, the District’s transportation department has mailed free passes to all households in some neighborhoods as a pilot project. Under the new program, households in all areas where residents are required to purchase a permit to park on the street will be eligible to request a free visitor pass. The free passes will not be sent to individual households unless a resident requests one.

D.C. Council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3), who chairs the committee overseeing the transportation department, said she is pleased that passes are no longer being mailed en masse to residents. But she said she remains concerned that the free passes easily could be misused, noting, for example, that residents could try to sell the passes to commuters who want to park on residential-zoned streets during the workday.

“We were supposed to have an overarching, comprehensive plan about parking in general, of which the visitor parking passes were supposed to be a part,” Cheh said. “The whole thing was supposed to be thought through. That has not happened.”

Cheh said she had asked city transportation director Terry Bellamy to delay the expansion of the free parking passes during a recent meeting. “My concern was that we’re not ready to make this change, and the change we’re making doesn’t link up with . . . how we deal with parking in general,” she said.

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The new passes will be valid from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30, 2014, and are valid for use inside the boundaries of the advisory neighborhood commission in which the passholder resides. The department said in a Thursday release that further details on the application process will be released in coming weeks.

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