Brookfield officials are considering changing the fees, durations and rules for commuter parking after hearing the results of a parking study conducted in April. Trustees are expected to discuss the issue again on Jan. 12 before making final decisions.
Noah Rife, the village’s management analyst, presented staff’s recommended increases to the costs for commuter parking at the three Metra train stations in town on Dec. 8 at the village board’s committee of the whole meeting.
Daily parking rates would increase from $1.50 to $3 in the lot behind village hall and from $2 to $3.50 along Brookfield Avenue. Near the Congress Park station, daily rates would go from $2.50 to $3.50 on Burlington Avenue east of Madison Avenue and to $4 on Burlington west of Madison and on the 4000 block of DuBois Boulevard.
For monthly commuter parking permits, the price would increase from $30 per month to different rates for residents and non-residents. At the downtown Brookfield station, residents would pay $45 per month while non-residents would pay $55. At the Hollywood and Congress Park stations, those numbers would jump to $55 for residents and $65 for non-residents.
And for quarterly permits spanning three months, the cost would increase from $90 to $130 for residents and $160 for non-residents at the Brookfield station and to $160 for residents and $190 for non-residents at Hollywood and Congress Park.
Rife said there is an incentive for commuters to opt for monthly permits over daily under the current fee structure, but the new costs would create a greater incentive to purchase quarterly permits and save money compared to the monthly rates.
He presented multiple proposals for rezoning various parking areas around Brookfield’s commuter stations, including unifying the hours across all three stations where parking spots are reserved for commuters. On Burlington Avenue, where commuter spots are reserved from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and on Brookfield Avenue, where they’re reserved from 5:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., the spots would instead be reserved from 5:30 a.m. to 11 a.m.
“[This] allows the majority of commuters to claim their space and get to work while also benefiting our downtown and other commercial districts across the train tracks. People not waiting until 2 p.m. or 7 p.m. to park in the spaces, it allows us to better utilize the vast parking we have,” Rife said.
“Most commuters are there by 11, so there’s no reason to be reserving these spots for commuters that aren’t going to come, that aren’t coming right now,” added Village Manager Tim Wiberg. “Open them up at 11 o’clock, so businesses can [benefit].”
Due to the length of the combined, regular and committee of the whole meetings, which started at 6:30 p.m., ended around 10 p.m. and were followed by a private executive session, trustees agreed to push finding a group consensus on the litany of proposed changes until their first meeting in January.
Downtown parking study
The presentation on proposed commuter parking changes came after trustees heard results of a parking study of downtown Brookfield that was completed in April.
Javier Millan, a principal at KLOA, Inc., the firm that conducted the study, said Brookfield has about 827 parking spaces downtown, about two-thirds of which comprise street parking while the remainder are spaces in private parking lots.
On Friday, April 11, and Saturday, April 12, KLOA recorded the number of occupied parking spaces each hour from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. He said at peak times, usually around 8 or 9 p.m., only 45% to 50% of on-street parking spots were occupied.
“It appears that there is plenty of parking. Notwithstanding this, we actually found there were a few segments of on-street parking that had a parking utilization of 95% or 100%, meaning that it was fully occupied,” he said.
Millan said KLOA recommended increasing the visibility and accessibility of street parking, including additional wayfinding signage, along Brookfield Avenue to alleviate the perception of a lack of parking around downtown, where Grand Boulevard has the highest demand.
He also recommended amending the exclusivity of certain spaces along Brookfield Avenue to commuters, instead allowing anyone to park there at most times.
“The majority of these parking spaces are assigned for commuter permit parking from 5:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.; however, the commuter parking demand does not warrant the need for those spaces. As such, it is our recommendation to reassign approximately 71 of those spaces and assign them as four-hour from 8 [a.m.] to 6 p.m.,” he said.
He said staff from other villages that KLOA reached out to reported four-hour parking to be better than three- or two-hour parking, as it gives people more flexibility and allows them to patronize multiple businesses without feeling pressured to move their car or leave.
“Give them the chance to actually explore your downtown area,” he said. “I think this would be an ideal place to provide that four-hour [parking].”
