A sign restricts overnight parking to cars with resident parking permit stickers in Washington Park area.

THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL / Andrew Dickerman

PROVIDENCE — Patrick Ward and his overnight parking campaign are on tour.

Last month, he flew from a meeting with a very receptive crowd of 50 at the headquarters of the West Broadway Neighborhood Association, to a small gathering with sympathetic urban-growth advocates from a new organization, Greater City: Providence.

Last night, he tackled a tougher audience in Fox Point, at the meeting of their local neighborhood association.

Sometimes he’s preaching to the choir, sometimes he has to sway skeptics, but everyone has an opinion on allowing overnight parking.

Ward’s one-man group, Citizens for Resident Permit Parking, is trying to overturn the overnight parking ban in Providence by supporting the introduction of pilot, sticker-parking programs in certain areas of the city.

Over the past year-and-a-half, he’s tried to shine a spotlight on an issue that has simmered under the surface here for some time.

Residents of triple-deckers in crowded neighborhoods wonder why they can’t park their cars overnight, while homeowners in Elmhurst and on the East Side fear student vehicles littering the streets, and the police and the street sweepers worry that they won’t be able to navigate the city’s slender streets in the middle of the night. City planners say that some residents even fear that permit-parking programs will make it easier for drug dealers to operate in their neighborhoods at night.

But with more cars on the roads than ever, and many former family homes converted to multi-unit residence, city residents have taken to paving their lawns and squeezing vehicles into impossibly tight spaces to avoid the $15 overnight parking violation tickets.

In the spring of 2006, Providence began its first overnight parking pilot program, allowing residents of the Washington Park neighborhood the chance to buy $25 stickers and park on the street overnight for a year. Only 125 residents took advantage of the program, however, and the mild winters have not put the potential clash between snow plows and street-parked cars to the test.

Ward thinks that more pilot programs are needed to prove the value of overnight parking, and has visited neighborhoods both friendly and hostile in an effort to spread his message. Recently, it appears the tide may have turned: his home, the Valley Neighborhood, will roll out an overnight parking program by the end of the year.

His visit to a West Broadway Neighborhood Association meeting resulted in a huge petition drive, and a pilot parking program there seems likely in the next year.

WARD makes the rounds in a blazer and jeans, billing himself as just another fed-up resident, tired of leaving for work in the morning and seeing an orange ticket pinned under his windshield wiper.

“I’m not a community activist. I’ve never done anything like this before,” he tells a group at Ada’s Creations in Elmwood.

At each meeting, Ward passes out pictures of front yards that have been paved over to serve as makeshift parking lots, and distributes signs reading “We support resident permit parking.” They are more common in some neighborhoods than others, but in the summer, the green and white signs became a common sight throughout the city.

Then, he tells the story of his personal parking revelation. He’s lived in cities around the Northeast — Boston, New York City, Hoboken, N.J. — and always kept a car without a problem.

Several years ago, he moved to Providence and bought a multifamily home in the Valley neighborhood, without a driveway. With parking scarce in the thin or non-existent driveways, he and most of the other residents in his neighborhood parked in a paved lot owned by a woman who lived down the street. It had spaces for 14 cars, and she rented them out cheap.

Then, due to a family situation, she could no longer rent the spaces. The impact on the neighborhood shocked Ward.

Tenants broke leases. Houses went up for sale. The domino effect was frightening, he said.

“Five families moved off the block, all because of parking,” he said. “I realized how this issue was tearing at the fabric of my community.”

Conversations with friends and neighbors made him feel that he wasn’t alone; that people cared about overnight parking, but that residents were unsure how to bring it to their neighborhoods. Ward felt he could capitalize on the fear of parking causing declining property values, and the need to improve quality of life, if he could only focus attention on the issue.

“I think a lot of people think you just can’t fight City Hall. It’s easier for them to move to another apartment,” Ward said.

WHILE the claim on Ward’s Web site that Providence is the only city in America with an overnight parking ban is debatable, it’s clear that it’s one of only a few. One example of a municipality with a parking ban is often tossed out at these parking summits is Beverly Hills, Calif. It’s a great lead-in for jokes about parking outside triple-decker mansions.

The city’s parking ban has been in place since approximately 1929, according to David Everett, a city planner who has attended several of the local parking meetings.

“I don’t think there were a lot of people who were paying attention to it as a historically important thing. It was just the way it was,” Everett said.

It exists now largely because it always has, and it has become so entrenched that it requires the political will to undo it.

But it’s not entirely clear whether individual council members, the mayor’s office, or even the police have the authority for deciding which areas gain parking programs. So far, it has been a fairly organic process: a street or small neighborhood organizes, sends around petitions and contacts City Hall, and at some point, either the mayor’s office or the local councilperson

“Various people ask who’s in charge of this, and it’s unclear,” Everett said.

Ward thinks that the pressure has to be put on all fronts — and recognizes that overnight parking fines have become a dependable source of revenue for the city as well.

“I really hope that this is made a serious issue in the 2010 election for City Council,” he said.

This summer, as the city administration raised the cost of daytime meter parking fines from $15 to $20, the City Council reduced the duration of the parking ban from 1 a.m. to 7 a.m., to 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. But council members walk a fine line, where some areas of their jurisdictions may fully support the programs, while other parts of their ward vehemently oppose them.

The police are sympathetic to residents’ concerns, and attend neighborhood parking forums, but have not come out to actively back a parking plan.

“The last thing I want to do is tag cars. I know there’s not enough parking.” Said Lt. Mary Day at the meeting of the West Broadway Neighborhood Association last month.

Everett said that there is no support at the city level for a citywide parking program. Parking programs would be instituted neighborhood by neighborhood, and only in areas that want them.

That may mean that some areas of the city will never have overnight parking — supporters point to the vocal neighborhoods on the East Side and in Elmhurst as the most stridently against overnight parking programs.

But the representatives in some of those areas say that the attitude towards parking has shifted in the last few years, as the populations have changed.

State Rep. David Segal, who served Fox Point as its City Councilman from 2003 to 2006 and now represents the area in the General Assembly, said that the priorities in the neighborhood are shifting.

“It’s changed, it’s changed. There are still people who are opposed to it. They’re a minority, but they’re a vocal minority,” Segal said.

And City Councilman Cliff Wood, who represents the College Hill neighborhood, which includes Brown University, said that attitudes are shifting in that bastion of anti-parking sentiment.

“I don’t know if that’s true… I’ve heard from a lot of people who actually want to try it,” Wood said. “I think any old assumptions need to be tested these days.”

The College Hill Neighborhood Association has a meeting on parking scheduled for Nov. 19.

Greg Gerritt, who lives in the Summit neighborhood on the East Side, said that his neighborhood has long been deeply divided over parking, with strong feelings on both sides. But the mood is changing, and a petition was recently circulated down his stretch of 6th Street to request a pilot program in their area. Residents couldn’t stand to see lawns paved over to make way for parking, he said.

“Everyplace else I’ve lived in the world you can park overnight,” Gerritt said.

Ward said that from his experience, younger residents want the permit parking, while older residents form the core of those against it.

“I don’t know where exactly the age point is, but it’s a young-old divide. The older they are, the less they like it,” Ward said.

His Web site, www.crpp-Providence.org, has a “Hall of Fame” promoting City Council members who have introduced parking programs in their neighborhoods. Right now, only Luis Aponte and Miguel Luna are featured for their work in creating the Washington Park program.

But at the same time, the Washington Park pilot program has not been as popular as some expected. While in the first year, 125 permits were sold, that figure has dropped to 37 permits this year, at $25 per permit. The Washington Park program has been extended until 2009, but the small numbers are part of the reason that city officials are looking to expand the programs elsewhere in the city.

The reaction he got last night was mixed, but Ward intends to continue his push. He’s hosting a Nov. 9 fundraiser at Nick-a-nee’s in the Jewelry District to raise money for his efforts, and make sure he has a steady supply of green parking signs.

“In Somerville, in Brooklyn, you walk a couple blocks, you find a spot. It’s no big deal. They can get around the plowing problem in Boston,” Ward said. “I’m just not sure why Providence can’t pull this off.”

dbarbari@projo.com