Nick Echard, Contributing Writer
Do you ever feel like you cannot find a place to park? Like you circle the block over and over again just to find a spot you will have to leave in an hour?
Richmond has a parking problem, and to understand this issue we need to look at the multitude of layers causing it, such as VCU, the SP Plus Corporation and the increasingly strict enforcement of parking violations.
Richmond has seen a 280% increase in parking citations this year, with stop sign parking citations jumping from 358 to 1,300 over the last year, according to the Richmonder. This comes as a result of a 2025 rule to increase the distance one can park behind a stop sign to 30 feet. One can also assume that this increase in parking citations has played a hand in the approximately $460,000 Richmonders pay in parking tickets each month.
As a Carver resident, I am no stranger to SP Plus. Their red and yellow logo and flashing yellow lights have become a beacon of dread for my friends and me.
SP Plus is a private company hired by the city of Richmond for a $28 million contract. SP Plus manages parking infrastructure in Richmond, including parking garages, parking fees and parking enforcement. Police officers still give out parking infractions, but SP Plus has mainly issued parking tickets in recent years.
Speaking from experience, the weekly street cleaning in Carver makes for quite the scramble to find parking spaces and SP Plus is always there to issue tickets if your car is on the wrong side of the street.
VCU has also played a hand in Richmond’s parking problem. VCU’s campus expansion creates construction, temporarily removing parking spots, while new VCU buildings limit or remove parking. VCU Health recently closed its 12th street parking deck, according to VCU Health. VCU’s student enrollment is up 4.4% since 2024, and yet with the increase in student population, the number of parking spaces has not increased at a similar rate.
A possible solution to limiting the $460,000 that Richmonders spend every month on parking tickets would be to use some of that money to create more parking spaces available to Richmonders.
Perhaps this is a sign for Richmond to become a less car-dependent city and put some of its money toward public transportation and bigger bike lanes.