Danville cracks down on River District parking  

Danville faced a problem, but it was a good kind of problem to have. Its downtown, once a landscape of former tobacco and textile buildings, had been so successfully revitalized that parking had become a headache.

“Timed parking was not being enforced,” says Alyssa Turner, interim executive director of the River District Association, a nonprofit dedicated to the revitalization of the city’s downtown, which was rebranded as the River District in 2015.

As a result, coveted spaces were being occupied for hours by employees of stores and restaurants, squeezing out would-be customers.

The local police department lacked the personnel to devote to the problem, according to City Manager Ken Larking, so city officials decided to work with a third party to monitor and enforce parking limits downtown. “It was not about making money but about changing behavior,” Larking says.

In June, Pivot Parking, a South Carolina parking management firm, began using a license plate reader mounted on a car to monitor about 1,500 on- and off-street spaces in the River District. Brandon Lauterbach, Pivot’s co-founder and executive vice president, says the occupancy data these sweeps generate will help the city evaluate whether and where it needs to expand timed parking, which now runs from Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

“We are not there just to write tickets,” he says.

Initially, people who overstayed the limits on timed spaces found warnings under their windshield wipers, but citations soon followed, mostly for $25. Lauterbach says that revenue from tickets has been averaging between $250 to $300 a month.

Merchants like Cheryl Sutherland, owner of Main Street Art Collective, are happy about the new enforcement measures, although an initial time limit of one-hour parking on specific streets downtown proved unpopular. Sutherland started a successful petition to expand the limit to two hours to allow people more time to browse, shop and dine. “As far as [customer] traffic goes, it’s been a big deal,” she says about the new measures.

Enforcement on time-limited spaces is just one part of Danville‘s parking efforts downtown. The city also is building a 434-space garage estimated to cost between $18 million and $19 million to expand capacity, says Michael Adkins, the city’s chief financial officer.

“We’re not blazing any trails here in Danville,” Larking says about the changes, “just best practices.”