Conversation with Mark Lyons

Mark Lyons isn’t scared of talking about paid parking, despite its reputation in the community. He's not jumping at the opportunity to talk about it, either, but as Sarasota parking manager, he is preparing for a serious conversation about a topic he says a city of this size must address.

A comprehensive parking strategy — a goal Lyons is pursuing — will go beyond paid parking. We talked to Lyons about outreach, changing residents’ attitudes and how parking ties in with larger issues in Sarasota.

How much of the city's parking issues are a matter of outreach?

Communicating with people in advance about parking options is a big challenge. In particular, in our city and cities of our size, people are not thinking about parking, because they have the perception it’s just a small, quaint little town, and it should be easy. We’re subject to the same growth any city of our size or even big cities have. When these construction projects come in, construction groups need to have accessible areas to work on their project. They consume parking.

There’s an ongoing effort to communicate the importance of parking, not only through the parking division. It’s got to kind of integrate the entire city government: Planning needs to understand to what degree parking impacts a community. Engineering needs to understand. I’m not saying they don’t get it  — they understand, but they don’t look at it as broadly or on a micro level like I do, because that’s my focus. Once we start making this 360 loop, then we start raising the consciousness of people about parking within our community.

It takes a long-term commitment to integrating our services, just continually talking about how we can benefit everyone. That’s about identifying accessible parking. It’s about educating the public about the issues of parking — how parking can help eliminate this congestion in downtown, how we interact with transportation modes. I tease our engineers and transportation people (that) the best way to improve our transportation and alternative mode systems is to create an on-street paid parking system. Quite frankly, once you do that, then the mind starts thinking there’s an alternative to coming down and parking in the most convenient location we can find. We all want that, but realistically, is it worth an extra 10 minutes searching for the space? Is it worth the cost of travel? Should I travel by myself or carpool?

How do you change the mindset of people who say “I want to come down and park without thinking about it,” if you can’t do that anymore?

You can — if you know where you’re going. This is the message I want to get out. Yes, it’s getting more congested and more difficult to find a parking space, but if you know where you’re going, it’s not difficult. If you know the time of day when congestion is greater, then you know you have options you can take advantage of. Do I want to be on the prime streets, do I want to be a block or two off or do I want to use off-street parking facilities? These are the things we need to start thinking about, the options within the platform we provide.

With paid parking, though, how do you get past the mentality of “this is the way it’s always been done?”

It’s funny, because this city had paid parking for like 27 years. Meters on the street, all over. They were pulled down in the late ‘60s. I think the mentality that it’s not ever going to work or it’s not going to be part of our community, that sort of overlooks the fact that we are growing. We aren’t growing — we have grown. If you look around, the growth is here. We need to be looking at new ways of meeting our objectives in a lot of different areas.

If we develop paid parking, that helps manage a lot of the resources that are in place. Not in a sense that it just drives revenue, in the sense that it makes using these parking spaces easier for the community. It also allows us to improve the parking districts by taking those funds and being part of those districts. Whether it’s improvements on the streets, curbs, storefronts, new technologies that would make navigating and walking downtown easier, those are the types of the things parking systems can provide. Then you get into the intrinsic value issues: We reduce the carbon footprint, we make walking in the community safer, it becomes more enjoyable. 

So how do attitudes change?

We have to commit to understanding. We have to do things a little bit differently. I’m not pushing hard for paid parking. I believe there is a time and place for on-street paid parking to take place. The question is, can we mitigate or delay the implementation as long as possible to the point where it’s not a strain on the community, it’s not a stress or burden on the tax base, it makes sense and helps the tax base continue to evolve? I think we’re at that tipping point, but we’ve done a lot of things over the last three, four years to try to prevent early implementation.

What’s it like having a job where you are, to many people, a natural target for ire?

(Parking's) sort of like water — you kind of expect it to be there until it’s not. This is really the challenge. There’s always something new occurring. There’s always new developments and accommodations. We try to help people who have special needs throughout the community on a case-by-case basis. When you look at something like the turnaround on Main Street right now, I argued for every space I could get with the planning staff. I recognize they need certain ones, but I want to preserve the spaces we have. When people see we do that kind of stuff — that does give us pride and satisfaction in the process. It’s just looking forward to find ways to help the community, one parking space at a time — making sure our facilities are safe, smart and our programs are sustainable.