Encourage flexible parking and shared parking arrangements.
Parking demands operate on a peak and off-peak schedule depending on related land use. Taking advantage of distinct but complementary patterns, such as office parking that is generally empty in the evenings and on weekends, and residential parking that is generally utilized more in the evenings, offers an opportunity for Lexington to better satisfy residents and commuters without increasing parking supply. Shared parking is a land use/development strategy that optimizes parking capacity by allowing complementary land uses to share spaces, rather than producing separate spaces for separate uses.
Shared or flexible parking with adjacent users may offer opportunities to better streamline maintenance costs, provided that the operational challenges of sharing such a critical resource can be alleviated. On the horizon, driverless cars and mass transit options may alleviate this problem altogether; but, for now, shared and flexible parking should be encouraged. Continued development of autonomous vehicle policies throughout the next few years should lead to further zoning ordinance text changes to reflect the evolving market for that technology.