March 20, 2023
DIXON Congratulates Emily Kwatinetz on her Promotion to Principal Consultant
We are thrilled to announce the promotion of Emily Kwatinetz to Principal!
Emily continues to be an essential part our team, and she has been instrumental in the success of our projects throughout the country. Emily deeply understands municipal operations, and she has expertise in parking policies and technology. Beyond managing our Planning Team and projects, Emily oversees our Data Team and the development of our new software solution, the DIXON Data Suite which has been successfully deployed in numerous municipalities.
Emily’s impact in the industry has been recognized by several awards including the Southwest Parking & Transportation Association Emerging Leader award this past October, and she received the “40 under 40” award from the National Parking Association in 2018.
Emily is an elected board member of the Pacific Intermountain Parking and Transportation Association. She also volunteers for the International Parking and Mobility Institute and the Washington State pedestrian advocacy nonprofit, Feet First.
Emily frequently presents at industry conferences, drawing upon her consulting experience supporting a range of municipal programs including paid parking, revenue collection and reconciliation, maintenance, employee and residential permits, wayfinding, shared parking, and other transportation and mobility matters. We are grateful to have Emily on our team!
Congratulations, Emily!
Julie Dixon, President
Dixon Resources Unlimited
December 06, 2018
Kevin Holliday Joins Dixon Resources Unlimited
San Diego, CA: Dixon Resources Unlimited is pleased to welcome Kevin Holliday as a Senior Associate. Kevin is an experienced urban planner with public and private experience who brings firsthand knowledge and program management skills to the DIXON team. Earning his stripes through his work with the high-profile SFpark program, Kevin went on to manage one of the largest vanpool programs in the country.
Throughout his career, Kevin has forged productive working relationships with fellow planners, meter shop technicians, department heads, and external government officials. He has written and edited RFPs and has overseen evaluation processes for multiple procurements, most recently negotiating a $45M procurement for the Metro Vanpool Program Vehicle Supplier bench contract for LA Metro. Kevin has demonstrated his ability to successfully navigate relationships with suppliers and consultants.
At the University of Southern California, Kevin managed a $500,000 research grant from the California Department of Transportation to study and encourage the use of public-private partnerships in the transportation sector. As part of the project, he conducted original research including literature reviews, stakeholder interviews, and detailed comparative analysis of contracts.
Kevin served on an interdisciplinary team to implement SFpark, a radical program to revise San Francisco’s on- and off-street parking policies. The City’s $24M program introduced demand-based, variable pricing for City-managed parking resources. He presented the Program’s goals to internal and external audiences and wrote numerous documents and studies that resulted in improved policies. SFMTA used his work to support the decisions to charge for holiday parking, extend operating hours, and overhaul the City’s disabled placard policy.
Dixon Resources Unlimited is a small, woman-owned consulting firm that focuses on supporting municipal parking needs. We develop customized parking roadmaps to define the current and future parking needs of our clients. Our specific areas of expertise include identifying opportunities for on-street and off-street parking, engaging with stakeholders, developing policy and operating plans, and implementing technology solutions for growing cities. DIXON has a proven track record of assisting cities throughout North America to identify managerial, operational, and technological improvements to their parking programs. Kevin will aid in DIXON’s mission, and we look forward to an exciting future together.
Kevin holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Occidental College and a Master of Arts in Urban Planning from the University of California, Los Angeles.
January 24, 2017
PIE 2017 Seminars: Enforcement & Permit Districts
By Julie Dixon & Emily Kwatinetz, Dixon Resources Unlimited
Have a problem parking area? Create a permit restriction!
Is this how you are managing your parking challenges? Please don’t let that be your parking management approach. As we work with municipalities, we often find that they begin to lose control of their parking programs due to the overwhelming number of ‘band-aid’ restrictions that have been implemented to address immediate issues.
We understand that problem areas must be addressed promptly, especially if you have your administration or city council haranguing you to fix the problem, but we need to remember to try to be pro-active, rather than reactive, in managing parking issues. Now, don’t get us wrong, we like to tackle issues directly, but when it comes to parking, immediate reactions can often lead to chasing the tail of the problem rather than developing a long-lasting solution. Once you apply the immediate fix, it will likely just push the problem to another location. While this might be your opportunity for job security (lol), this approach will ultimately lead to an unmanageable and inefficient overall parking operation. We are certain that some of you reading this article have inherited a parking program that is simply running from a list of restrictions.
So how should you address parking issues? Beside the critical need for community outreach and stakeholder engagement, the simple answer is effective parking enforcement.
No, we are not telling you to go out and blanket your community with parking tickets. But consider that effective parking enforcement is a balanced approach to achieve overall compliance. You need to identify the core root of an issue in order to address the specific solution needed. This can be achieved by deploying well-trained and diplomatic parking enforcement officers (or as we like to call them – Parking Ambassadors) that are policy-educated and informed on how to address a situation and the needs of the community that they serve. Will more tickets be written, yes, however it’s the approach that you take when addressing the situation at hand that will have the overall impact on the situation and the community.
When is a permit district required? Your municipality should have policies and procedures to determine when a permit district will be considered and the attributes necessary to attain approval. There should be defined protocols and assessments that need to be completed in order to apply standardized regulations. Additionally, whenever implementing a permit program, please consider the automations necessary to support a permit management system. If you have parking staff trying to monitor and manage permit and parking regulations that vary by block face without automation, it can become very difficult and cumbersome to enforce.
Don’t leave PIE until after you attend this presentation at Noon on Wednesday.
http://pieshow.parkingtoday.com/sessions.cfm
