By Susan Motander
Last week, the City of Monrovia released the results of a parking study of Old Town. The idea of a full parking study came out of the public discussion of the feasibility of turning the old 4thDimension (formerly the J.C. Penny’s location) across from the library into a Community Center. While that plan did not pan out, the discussion regarding the parking situation in Old Town came to light and a full study was requested of the city’s traffic engineer.
The good news is that there is plenty of street parking and public parking in Old Town. The bad news is that peak hours of use sees up to 85 percent of the free public parking spaces occupied.
The study also showed that parking demand is not evenly spread across all of Old Town – while most of the spots in the center of Old Town are occupied, spaces remain available in the outlying lots.
Several suggestions were also put forward in the study. These included instituting more restrictive time limits on the lots in the center of Old Town to discourage employees from using these lots, striping one lot to create additional parking spaces, and adding electric vehicle charging stations in each of the lots.
These, along with other ideas regarding additional safety measures, will be discussed by the Monrovia Old Town Advisory Board sometime this month or next. After that meeting, the city will work on developing an implementation plan to institute the recommendations from the report.
