INTRODUCTION

The City of Reading (City) is a third-class city in Pennsylvania operating under the home rule form of government. The City is located in Berks County and has a population of approximately 90,000. The City is seeking professional proposals from qualified consulting firms to develop a comprehensive parking plan for the City. Parking is an instrumental and inevitable part of transportation and real estate within the City. As the City grows and attracts more prosperous economic development, our focus necessarily shifts from development designed for single-occupancy vehicles, to mixed-use, urban, and transit-oriented developments. The comprehensive parking plan will be developed in conjunction with the Downtown Plus Strategic Plan to attract and retain businesses, workforce, residents, and visitors to the City.

The City will use this plan to better manage public parking resources and to anticipate future parking needs as the City's revitalization unfolds.

The Comprehensive Parking Plan project will be administered by the City of Reading's Community Development Department.

The purpose of this task is to quantify the existing public and private parking supply in the City and the existing demand for parking based on residential, commercial, and institutional needs.

The Study Area for development of this comprehensive plan are designated on the map included in the Appendix. For purposes of this assessment, "public parking facilities" include those parking garages and surface parking lots owned/operated by the Reading Parking Authority.

This quantification will be accomplished by an inventory and assessment of parking resources and challenges which includes:

• Accumulation Counts. Collect data on the number of vehicles parked in public parking facilities during specific period of times and the number of vehicles entering and exiting during that specified period to summarize by time period the number of vehicles and establish each facility's capacity during peak and off-peak usage.
• Duration and Turnover. Collect data on parking duration and turnover rates to effectively determine the use of public parking facilities.
• Parking Demand (Land Use Method). Determine parking generation rates which can be used to estimate the demand for parking by tabulating the type and intensity of land uses throughout the study area; and based on reported parking generation rates, estimate the number of parking spaces needed for each unit of land use.

The assessment of on-street parking should quantify the effect of the following on parking availability:

• Truck parking for residents utilizing trucks in their work
• Utilization of handicap parking
• Utilization of loading zones and dedicated pickup/drop off parking
• Assessment of Future Parking Demand. Assess future parking demand based on the current and proposed land development projects, growth projections for the City, and available data from the Comprehensive Plan and other past studies.

The assessment should also include an inventory of existing private parking facilities in the study areas, as well as bicycle parking, existing public/mass transportation routes, institutional shuttle services, and ridesharing opportunities. It should also summarize enforcement, administration, charge rates, and maintenance of public parking facilities by the Reading Parking Authority.