Paid Parking Plan for Downtown Bend Sparks Debate

Pulling into a street parking space in downtown Bend with his family of four on a recent Tuesday afternoon, Rory Howland was pleasantly surprised to not see any parking meters.

“Our downtown is all meters, $2-and-something cents an hour,” said Howland, who was visiting from Santa Cruz, California. Unlike Howland’s town, Bend offers two hours of street parking for free. “It’s nice to see a sign that says ‘free parking,’” he said.

It’s a sight that visitors and locals alike have enjoyed on the streets of downtown Bend for decades. Pricing for street parking has been suggested on more than one occasion amid a longstanding debate and debate over what is perhaps downtown’s most coveted resource. Street parking is now the only place where people can park for free downtown, as the City has added cost for a parking garage and nearby surface lots. But a new plan from the Downtown Bend Business Association suggests free street parking may no longer be doing any favors for businesses or customers.

The association says it put forward the plan to start conversations about how to make parking better. If the goal was to spark conversation, then the plan has been successful. And the conversation is scalding hot.

More than 1,000 people have provided feedback on the paid parking plan through a survey and more have signed a petition to shoot it down. Some are concerned that making paid parking more widespread would deter locals and risk business in a fragile economic climate, while others say it’s time to put a price on a precious resource.

“The feedback itself is really the outcome that we’re seeking,” Downtown Bend Business Association Executive Director Rachel O’Rourke said during a June 10 presentation to the Bend City Council, which sets parking policy. She declined to share with the Source how people have responded so far, but said she’ll do so once an additional 500 people respond in order to reach a minimum threshold.

Under the downtown association’s Draft Parking Management Plan, released last month, the City would begin charging while lifting the two-hour time limit for the most coveted storefront street parking spaces, starting at $1 per hour for hours one through three, $3 for hours three and four and $5 per hour after that. Street parking at the fringes of downtown would remain free with a time limit, while parking lots and a garage would remain at a lower, fixed price. Some of the money could be used to help improve downtown with lighting, flowers, maintenance or other public benefits, the plan says.

According to O’Rourke, recent surveys and conversations among the downtown community have revealed a few common themes: convenient parking can be hard to find, while the two-hour limit hindered customers’ outings and caused concern over parking tickets.

“Today, many people feel the pressure because they’re constantly watching the clock,” O’Rourke told the City Council. “This draft model asks, what if visitors had more flexibility? What if extending their stay was easier? What if customers felt encouraged to spend more time instead of rushing downtown? I’m not saying this is the answer, we’re just asking: Is this better?”

Premium spot for a premium price

If Bend started charging for parking on downtown streets, it wouldn’t be the first time.

In fact, it was one of the first cities to place meters on its streets in the 1940s or 50s, before removing them in the 1980s to spur economic improvement, according to a 2025 Parking Today article written by Tobias Marx, who until recently was Bend’s parking manager. Bend transformed its parking system with new technology under Marx, including an artificial intelligence-powered wayfinding system to point drivers in the direction of open spaces and, for the City, a data map guiding parking officers to vehicles breaking the rules.

The City has considered plans to charge for street parking going back more than two decades, according to a 2004 article from the Bulletin. But that never happened, despite it being one of the recommendations in a 189-page parking management plan a consultant created for the City in 2017, as strain on downtown parking grew. Instead, the City spread the two-hour time limit across downtown streets and began charging in downtown lots and the parking garage.

This leads some drivers to circle downtown in search of free parking rather than heading straight for a lot or garage. This phenomenon — called “cruising” — can account for anywhere from 8% to 74% of traffic congestion in downtown areas, wrote Donald Shoup, a university professor who pioneered many of the fundamentals in modern parking policy, in a 2006 paper.

“The reality is, as long as street parking is free, people will circle and look and look before they go to the garage or the lots,” said Bend Mayor Melanie Kebler, who defended the paid parking plan at the Downtown Bend Business Association annual meeting on June 8. “That’s just human behavior.”

Bend’s Centennial Parking Garage downtown has about 500 spaces, with a rate of $1 an hour. Credit: Eli Zatz

Introducing paid parking to streets, Kebler said, tries to create an incentive: “If you’re going to take a premium spot, you’re going to pay a premium price.”

In his book, “The High Cost of Free Parking,” Shoup argued that offering free parking comes with immense social costs, like more expensive housing, increased pollution and urban sprawl. It’s a principle that Oregon state agencies recognize in a parking management guidebook for cities, which calls pricing “likely the most significant and effective step that cities can take to manage demand.” Some cities across the U.S. have even introduced demand-responsive parking payment systems, meaning the price goes up the busier it gets.

“As liberal as you might be, markets are a good way to allocate scarce or limited goods,” Tony Jordan, Portland-based president of the advocacy group Parking Reform Network, told the Source. “If there was a better solution, I’d probably be promoting it.”

But in Bend, it’s unclear how scarce parking really is.

There are about 1,800 street parking spaces in downtown Bend. Lots and garages provide more than 1,000 more.

Shoup’s rule of thumb is that local governments should charge the lowest price so that one or two spaces per block remain open, which usually shakes out to about 15% vacancy, or 85% occupancy. State officials cite this principle in Oregon’s parking management guide, and Bend’s 2017 plan recommended the City adopt the “85% rule,” or consider new ways to manage parking after reaching that threshold.

The City’s monitoring data shows that during mid-day on the busiest weeks of the year, like Thanksgiving or Fourth of July, up to nine out of every 10 parking spaces were occupied, according to a summary provided by the City. But most streets did not see average occupancy climb higher than 85% when considering averages from the three busiest times of the day: noon, 3pm and 6pm. For example, on the week of the Fourth of July last year, average occupancy on NW Wall Street fluctuated from 88% to 82% to 87% during those times. On nearby Bond Street, downtown’s other main drag, street parking was never more than 85% full, on average.

“There is times during the day where we’re hitting or slightly exceeding that 85% kind of a threshold, and there’s times of the day where we’re not,” said David Abbas, director of the City’s Transportation and Mobility Department.

‘We don’t touch parking’

Data to show just how strained the downtown parking system is hasn’t been presented by the business association or the City. Neither has information about how much revenue paid street parking could generate, or specifics on how it would be spent.

That’s part of what’s made some downtown property owners skeptical of the proposal.

At least one-third of downtown property owners have signed on to a letter asking the association to pause the draft plan, according to McKenna Mikesell, vice president with RSM Investments, a property owner and renovator downtown. A board member with the downtown association until earlier this year, Mikesell said the plan took her by surprise, causing her to launch an online petition to “Keep Downtown Bend Parking Free” that now has nearly 1,200 signatures.

“In my time on the downtown association, the narrative was always, ‘We don’t touch parking,’” Mikesell told the Source. “This came out of left field for me, where I didn’t think this was something that we should be bringing to council.”

Despite the petition, Mikesell said she is not inherently against the idea of paid street parking but wants to see the data first.

The downtown association’s board of business and property owners voted to move the draft parking plan forward in order to gather feedback, according to O’Rourke.

It marks a shift in dialogue between the downtown association and City elected leaders, which have previously clashed over urban planning issues. When the City launched a study on how to create low-car streets to comply with new land use rules urging walking, biking and transit, the downtown association created its own survey and wrote a letter to City planners emphasizing the importance of car travel for downtown business. In that survey, about 65% of respondents said they would visit downtown less or not at all if there was no free parking option. At the same time, 77% of people said they either had frustrations with the downtown parking system or visit less frequently because of it.

Last year, a majority of downtown businesses recommended the City require restaurants remove “parklets” — the outdoor seating extension areas left over from the COVID-19 pandemic — in order to free up more parking. The City Council declined.

A common refrain among paid parking skeptics is that changes to the parking system have deterred longtime local shoppers, and paid parking could be a final straw.

“The heart of our downtown and our community is the locals,” said Kirsten Gilreath, co-owner of two boutique clothing stores downtown, at the downtown association meeting on June 8. “If we lose that and we don’t guard them — they’re the ones that tell their friends to go shop places, they’re the ones that hold this community together, and we will see a decline in the heart of downtown. It is a fragile ecosystem.”

People park and shop in downtown Bend on Sunday, June 14. Credit: Eli Zatz

Downtown visits by tourists and locals have followed similar trends in recent years, dropping slightly during the COVID-19 pandemic before rebounding in 2025, although not fully to 2019 levels, according to data from Visit Bend, the City’s tourism agency. Locals made up about two-thirds of the visits to downtown Bend last year.

Angela Salido, who owns Outside In, a clothing store on Wall Street, and sits on the downtown association board, said she is torn about paid street parking. On one hand, she said she hates the thought of turning locals away due to cost or overcomplication. But if paid parking makes the system smoother, then it’s a conversation worth having, she said.

“We’re growing. We can’t stop it,” Salido told the Source. “I think we all have opinions on the growth. We kind of just got to roll with it at this point I guess because none of us have control. We have to grow with it. I don’t know that paid parking is the way to go, but I respect the conversation, I respect it happening.”

This article appears in the Source June 18, 2026.