Downtown Parking Study to Meet Current and Future Needs of Colorado Residents and Visitors

The Town of Lyons, Colorado is a destination in its own right, in addition to being known as the “Double Gateway to the Rocky Mountains” with two routes west of town that lead to Rocky Mountain National Park. If you don’t want to take our word for it, you should see for yourself!

Despite its attractions, which include music festivals and cycling and hiking opportunities, the Town of Lyons is like most jurisdictions with its own unique mix of parking challenges. The Town felt that it needed to develop a parking plan to better meet the needs of visitors, downtown merchants, and employees and residents while accommodating current and future parking demand.

With this in mind, Wells + Associates parking and traffic studies team met with Town staff, observed existing conditions, and conducted a Strength, Opportunities, Aspirations and Results (SOAR) analysis with local stakeholders. Although a significant concern was the need for additional downtown parking capacity, our parking study recommended a number of short-term and long-term strategies (in addition to identifying additional parking supply) to achieve the Town’s goals to meet current and future demand.

W+A’s SOAR exercise with Town officials and stakeholders helped to achieve a consensus on a number of issues, including the:

• greatest strengths of existing parking operations, traffic flow, and Town character,
• best opportunities to improve and expand upon parking operations, traffic flows,
  safety, and accessibility,
• desire to both slow down and capture through-traffic not destined for the Town in order to increase patronage of local businesses and make the area more pedestrian and bicycle friendly,
• preferred future vision for the Town of Lyons for residents, visitors, and business
  owners, and
• measurable results to determine the vision for the future has been achieved.

Our parking study focused on a number of solutions, including:

• Utilizing existing parking supply more effectively,
• Identifying opportunities to increase current parking supply,
• Recommending parking restrictions to create business‐friendly turnover,
• Ensuring that users make use of the most appropriate parking locations,
• Improving traffic flow and operations,
• Slowing down and capturing through‐traffic, and
• Creating an efficient and effective means of wayfinding throughout the Town via
  signage and striping.