From curbside pickups to ridesharing services and Amazon Prime deliveries, drivers making quick trips through neighborhoods or to local businesses have become increasingly commonplace in Fairfax County.
However, the county still doesn’t have any regulations around short-term parking, even after it adopted new parking rules in 2023, its first comprehensive update in 35 years.
That could change in the coming months. The Fairfax County Department of Transportation has started exploring the possibility of a standard or requirement for providing short-term parking, similar to the rules currently in place for off-street parking, loading spaces, accessible spaces and other needs.
“We are in the early stages of this analysis,” an FCDOT spokesperson confirmed to FFXnow. “We have not yet offered any proposal to the Board of Supervisors or the public for feedback.”
The review will include an examination of why short-term parking standards haven’t been established yet and how demand for deliveries, ridesharing and other services that would use those spaces has changed.
The spokesperson cautioned that county staff are still gathering information, so “it would be premature to draw assumptions/conclusions at this stage” about whether new standards are actually needed and what form they might take if they are.
“We’d anticipate the earliest we may have something to put forward for consideration would be this summer,” he said. “However, there is no definitive timetable for the consideration of this topic.”
While some properties offer designated pickup or time-limited spaces, the lack of rules for short-term parking is just one gap in the county’s existing zoning ordinance, which “doesn’t do a great job of accommodating the various needs” of more urban areas like Tysons and parts of Reston, according to Hunter Mill District Supervisor Walter Alcorn.
Alcorn, who serves as vice chair of the Board of Supervisors’ transportation committee, says complaints about parking management, including delivery and rideshare vehicles blocking streets because they don’t have anywhere to pull off, have cropped up on a few roads in Reston.
For example, his office has been working with residents and business owners along Reston Station Blvd east of Wiehle Avenue after they raised concerns about the availability of parking — a challenge some fear will be exacerbated by additional development planned in the area.
In addition to vehicles blocking the street or double parking, there have been issues with people occupying spaces all day even though they don’t live there and aren’t frequenting a nearby business, taking advantage of the free spots instead of paying for parking at Reston Station.
“These are the types of issues that are resulting in staff looking at updating our parking programs and also us as board members trying to work through issues, sometimes on a street-by-street basis,” Alcorn said.
The Parking Reimagined initiative adopted in September 2023 established a new, tiered system for parking requirements, which vary depending on the type and density of development. It also introduced bicycle parking standards and tweaked requirements for loading spaces, including the addition of an option for a “receiving facility” to accommodate deliveries instead for buildings under 10,000 square feet in size.
Alcorn believes the updates have been “successful overall,” but he says the county needs more flexibility to manage short-term parking and street parking.
“Where you have, for example, residential over retail, and it’s facing the street, it only makes sense to have short-term parking for retail users and then accommodating longer-term parking needs in other ways,” he said.
Along with regulations for short-term parking, one potential tool could be paid street parking, which is standard in nearby jurisdictions like D.C., Arlington and Alexandria but is limited in Fairfax County to a couple of private developments, including Reston Town Center.
County staff recommended in 2021 introducing paid street parking to Tysons, but they didn’t support the concept in Reston’s Transit Station Areas at the time. The study’s recommendations haven’t been implemented yet, and Alcorn said he’s not aware of any imminent plans.
“That’s still early phase,” Alcorn said. “We just don’t have that kind of parking system in Fairfax County yet anywhere, that I’m aware of. It’s just one of those things that we should be looking at to manage parking more efficiently for local residents and businesses.”
