Rockton Parking addressed at a public forum

By Marianne Mueller

REPORTER

Parking issues, concerns and ideas were addressed at a public forum on July 13 at the Rockton Village Hall. Connected with the meeting is a study being coordinated by SLATS- Stateline Area Transportation Study. Village President Dale Adams is part of the steering committee for the project.

Walker Parking Consultants presented results of a study. Walker is one of the biggest parking consulting firms headquartered in Elgin.

“The purpose of the study is to prepare parking needs assessment for downtown Rockton to assist in long term planning and to ensure parking does not become an issue in the future,” said Consultant Ezra Kramer.

“This study kicked off at the beginning of March but we had to hold off on collecting data until the weather broke a little bit.”

The meeting opened doors to give the public an opportunity to offer observations, opinions, and recommendations to improve parking and to learn from experiences in parking in the study area.

“We met with the businesses and have a really strong focus group mainly made up of business people. A lot of great dialogue came out of that meeting,” said Kramer.

“We wanted to get two perspectives; one from the businesses and the other from the public. It was important that someone from the Talcott Library was at the focus group meeting and they gave excellent input.”

Boundaries included in the study are Union St., East of IL. 2, South of the Rock River, and West Race St.

“We looked the parking supply on and off the street,” explained Kramer. “Nearly half of it was on the street. There is no signage that says, “No Parking.” People could park off the road a bit next to residential areas or in off street public lots. Behind most of the businesses on Main St. it is considered a private supply.”

“Occupancy counts show that a majority of spaces are unmarked along unimproved streets. This could be useless if there is no curb and gutter in specific sections, said Kramer.

The next segment featured parking demands.

Consultants listed peak periods of 11 a.m. and the weekend counting a total of 979 vehicles at different times throughout the day. A count done at 7 p.m. resulted in 271 cars. This equals 37 percent of parking demand overall. Surprisingly charts showed the demand being higher on weekdays than at other times.

Next to appear on screen were heat maps. These maps showed hot spots for parking with high utilization. Some of the places mentioned were the boat launch and Hononegah High School. “Restaurants generally have 10 times the demand,” said Kramer. “Even if others are busier during the day restaurants may reach a nighttime peak at around 7 p.m. which would be higher than at around 3 p.m. More people tend to go out at night.”

All event parking must be managed if any issues were to arise. If future changes in parking were to happen the Village of Rockton would need to make the proper changes to codes, ordinances or any restrictions.

While conveying walking distances it is estimated that on an average it only takes a minute and a half per block if parking away from the downtown area. Based on where someone parks it can take between one and five minutes to arrive at a destination. This walking distance is and attempt to relate to how long of a walk someone would actually take.

Time limits on posted signs need to be restructured or adjusted. A suggestion was made by consultants to place school day restrictions. Parking and major traffic such as at football games are not the intent of the study.

“When we did our work by the high school it was very busy,” said Kramer. Parking in the business district should be defined clearly for customers. One example is to add “Customer Only” parking signs to be posted.

The continuation of the overall project plan is to identify a quantitative analysis- narrowing down supply and demand, who is parking where, to get public input, policy reviews, and developing some.

Steps in the process connect with a long range planning exercise used to identify some of the solutions needed to keep problems from happening in the future.

The public is invited to take a survey related to parking in the downtown Rockton area. Go to www.surverymonkey.com/r/Rockton_Parking.