Could daytime parking lots be opened for night users?
Could local businesses partner to unlock more parking for visitors to Lansdale?
Borough officials are taking up talks on a new set of tactics meant to free up parking as the town’s event season approaches.
“I think we can all agree there’s not necessarily a ‘parking problem,’ but adjacency to where people want to go, that is an issue,” said councilman Mike Yetter.
Parking in and around downtown has been a hot topic for more than a decade, starting in 2010 into 2011 when council and the town’s parking authority commissioned a consultant to evaluate all parking in the town, and present possible solutions for using the current parking more efficiently while creating more. The firm presented their findings in November 2011, showing that the borough had just shy of 4,000 parking spaces in the downtown and Pennbrook Parkway areas, with roughly half used during peak hours.
Several recommendations have been implemented by council and the parking authority, including changes in parking prices to encourage turnover in the downtown area, the purchase of electronic kiosks to replace meters in three downtown lots, installation of wayfinding signs around town to point drivers toward lots, and the adoption of an app-based mobile payment system. An update to that study was presented in late 2023, and in early 2025 the town held another round of talks on parking after an employee of a Main Street business asked about permits or free parking for those who work there but commute from elsewhere.
In the March economic development committee meeting, Yetter told the town’s code enforcement committee this month, that group took up talks on a series of recommendations already being discussed by the town’s parking authority, that full council could consider. The first would be to examine whether town codes should do away with requirements to provide parking in certain areas, a move Yetter said could help spur redevelopment.
Yetter said he has heard that some possible redevelopment ideas may have fallen though because current codes would require large amounts of parking be available.
A second recommendation would be to allow businesses to add a secondary use of commercial parking, where a business with parking used by their own staff or customers during daytime hours, could profit by allowing it to be used by others at night.
“The example might be: Univest on West Main (Street), which has a large parking lot. The typical use of that lot would be for employees during the daytime, but after about 5 p.m. there’s not much demand for that, and the lot is sitting there, not far from restaurants and other attractions on Main Street,” Yetter said.
“Allowing for them to specifically have a secondary use, and be able to say ‘Let’s partner with Park Mobile, and allow for parking between the hours of, say, 5 and 11 p.m.,’ or sometime before employees come back in the next morning,” he said.
Councilman Rich DiGregorio asked if the former Wells Fargo Bank on Main Street could qualify for that secondary parking use, and Yetter said it could, and another possible applicant discussed by the EDC is the Derbyshire Marine building,which houses The Reporter and other businesses, just off of Main Street. Code committee chair Rafia Razzak asked if the shared parking and removing parking minimums would be applied just along Main Street or throughout the town, and Yetter said that’s part of the discussion.
Public works director Jason Van Dame added that no formal draft or recommendations has been created yet, but any such change would be vetted by both the borough and county planning commissions, along with borough staff and their land planning consultant, and likely the traffic engineer, before the code committee has their say.
“Then, ultimately, it comes back to council to make a final determination,” Van Dame said.
Overlay area a focus?
One area that could be a starting point, Van Dame said, could be the borough’s downtown business overlay district, where minimum parking requirements were eliminated roughly a decade ago for uses over 20,000 square feet, with some success.
“We did have some take advantage of that, to add residential uses, particularly in the downtown section around Madison Street. Then Covid hit, and what we found was, everybody’s working from home, their cars are staying in parking spaces all day, and people we want to come in to use the businesses in town, have less parking spots,” he said.
Another factor, per Yetter: the parking authority has started talks with SEPTA on establishing long-term parking permits for those who live in the Madison apartments, and elsewhere near Main Street, to use spaces in that garage instead of on streets.
“If you’re a resident in Madison (apartments), and you do work from home so you don’t move your car that much during the week, having a space over there that’s accessible across the bridge, and also under cover, I think is quite attractive, especially in winter and inclement weather,” Yetter said.
In his research, Yetter said, he’s read about other towns where multi-use buildings include parking structures used by residents at some times and visitors at others, such as ground-floor or underground garages.
In 2020 council approved a proposed apartment building for the corner of Third and Walnut Streets where a developer proposed using an automated parking system beneath, where cars would be moved by mechanical apparatus similar to a vending machine into garage slots without their drivers. Could such a system, if built, be considered for shared parking?
“If a property comes in, and gets redeveloped in the commercial or business district, that includes an automated parking system, and this amendment was in place — they would, by-right, be able to have a secondary use as a commercial parking garage,” Van Dame said.
Next steps
Yetter then asked if the code committee could vote to recommend staff move ahead with drafting a modification of current codes to allow for commercial parking as a secondary use.
“To me, this one’s almost a no-brainer. We can’t make them do it, but we can allow them to do it, and that opens the door for them to make some extra revenue,” Van Dame said.
Resident Dominic Frascella asked if that change would be limited to just the downtown overlay or also include the transit-oriented development zone near Pennbrook Parkway, and Van Dame said the areas included “will all get defined, as we look at and develop” a draft.
The code committee voted unanimously to direct staff to proceed with developing a draft and report back at future code committee meetings.
Lansdale’s borough council next meets at 7 p.m. on April 15 with various council committees starting at 6:30 p.m. on May 6, all at the borough municipal building, 1 Vine Street. For more information visit www.Lansdale.org.
The Lansdale Economic Development Committee meets Monday, April 20 at 6:30 p.m. at the borough municipal building.
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