“We found that my guests really adapted easily to our
downtown parking,” Long said in the recent Business Lexington article.
Parking should not be a complicated process, but to many
of the suburban mindset downtown parking is never as easy as it is in the
shopping malls like Fayette Mall or Hamburg. There one can park within a few hundred feet
of a store's front door, walk for a mile and a half until exhausting the
store's selection, go back to the car and move it a half mile and do it all
over again, until tired.
Long says it’s not the concept of paying for parking or
the short walk to the restaurant that creates a problem for her patrons. The hard part is the confusion which comes
from the inconsistent marking of visitor parking and employee/event or even the
resident parking.
I have long been of the persuasion that on-street
parking should be for those using it less than an hour at a time. That probably comes from the historical
1-hour limit on most parking meters.
Surface parking (hopefully tucked in a block interior and a simple
entrance) should be for several hours of usage (typically less than 3) and
structured parking for all day and residential patrons. Hence, on-street = highly visible, surface =
basically hidden and structured = part of the office/residential complex.
It does appear that progress is being made of arriving
at a standard identification symbol for parking facilities and there is a
working group of parking operators which meets regularly. But settling on a logo and some other
embellishments does not solve the problem quickly. Gary Means, LexPark
Executive Director, admits “The new signage will be phased in as budgets allow”
since the group is still discussing how the new signage will be funded.
The other side of the coin in any discussion of downtown
parking is; How are we going to continue to accommodate our need for
parking? Planners and developers first
look at what and how much parking will be needed, usually by looking at what
was required in the past. It is a
standard practice that they have been taught.
Past experiences and trends do not always allow for the
good prediction of future events.
Take a look at the “predictions” of Lexington's 1930 Comprehensive Plan. Public transportation consisted of a mix of
streetcars and auto-buses running routes which covered pretty much all of the
city limits. The Plan called for
systematically extending the streetcar lines into the establishing
neighborhoods, but due to the Great Depression and some Congressional acts
meant to counteract the poor economic times by 1938 the streetcars had all been
removed. I don't think anybody saw it
coming.
Take a look at the “predictions” of Lexington's 1947 Comprehensive Plan. Gearing up for and fighting World War II had
brought us out of the Depression, the GI's were coming home and ,with the
streetcars gone, everybody had a car these days. The Plan called for a certain percentage
increase in auto ownership by 1970, but we blew through that estimate by the
early '50s. The roads that we planned to
build like the By-Pass, now New Circle Rd, were undersized and crowded by the
time they opened. I don't think anybody
saw it coming.
It seems that we are always planning for the existing
situations or for those of the recent past since that is what we can justify
through statistics. Experience should
show that we have very little to look back on and say that we got it
right. Who planned for the use of
personal computers, either in the workplace or at home, or predicted the
explosion of the use of smart phones so that our community would be ready for
them when it happened?
Downtown retailers and developers do listen intently to
their existing and potential clients in terms of what the parking needs are
expected to be, but how many of
them or their predecessors were unprepared for the surprises cited above? Many cities are looking at TOD
(Transportation Oriented Development) but it doesn't come up in any news
reports or announcements about our downtown.
Not even the much ballyhooed Rupp Arena redesign or the Town Branch
project. Will Lexington be skipping that part of following
the trends in other “world class” cities?
There are some other trends to which we should be paying
attention.
Since 2008, the number of miles driven nationally has
fallen markedly. This was first
attributed to the onset of the recent economic recession and the housing
crisis. That statistic continues to
decline even after we have entered the “recovery” phase and we return to what
was normalcy. People, and young people
in particular, are just driving less miles and not always in their own
vehicle. Car-sharing is a recent urban
phenomenon to which the suburbanite mind does not relate.
Suburbanites can really grok the idea of
a flashy car and the open road. This
must be what sells cars because it is in almost all of the new car ads on
TV. Even the ones showing downtown
driving have the subject auto as the only car on the street. If this were reality, then there is no
parking problem. Crowded roads and urban
gridlock is not meshing well with the alleged purposes of buying a new car.
The main reason that suburbanites need an auto in the
first place is to get to a job. Jobs in
which wages have generally not kept up with the family needs. New roads and cheap oil have allowed past
home buyers to drive until they qualified for a mortgage. Now that need for a car is more pronounced
than ever but the new roads, the cheap oil and the quality mortgages are fading
from most household's view.
More and more of today's new automobile commercials are
promoting extras like navigation systems and Wi-Fi hot spots
with live streaming of video or Bluetooth communications instead of 4-wheel
drive and snappy handling. These are all
aimed at the youth market and that market is remarkably shunning the auto
either by choice or economic necessity.
The just released 2013 Car Affordability Study, from
Interest.com measures how much the households in our top metro areas should pay
for a car that they can afford. The
formula is simple, a down payment of at least 20%; auto financing lasting no
longer than four years; and principal, interest and insurance not exceeding 10%
of a household’s gross income. Mike
Sante, managing editor of Interest.com, in a statement said "Car costs are
one of the most controllable parts of a household's budget."
The top 25 metro areas were compared by median household
income and this formula and then ranked.
How do you think that Lexington
fared? I, for one, was surprised.
Lexington's
median income is $48,306, which places us right between the last two
communities on the study's list. It
nestles us right between Miami and Tampa. Of course the “affordable” range of auto in Tampa was $14,516, that is 52.48% less than the median price of a 2013
vehicle. The typical two car household
of the Lexington
suburbs can now safely afford about half of a new car. That, my friends, is without considering any
commuting costs or maintenance. Our
recent college graduates, with their high student loan debt, cannot afford to
drive until they qualify to live in the suburbs.
Wages, as a percentage of GDP, have been declining since
1970. Lexington's population since merger has
nearly doubled and what looked to be a large suburban growth was a great migration
from the inner city. Indications are
that this migration will reverse itself as it has in other cities.
We also need to hold on to our values when we choose a
direction and avoid the traps of other cities.
In Philadelphia,
the administration has spent years talking up the value of lively, walkable
streets. Their Convention Center was
purposely built without parking to discourage hordes of motorists from jamming
the streets around the building, and to encourage visitors to use transit.
Their 1991 Center City Plan prohibits parking next door on the adjacent Arch Street,
specifically in the belief that Philadelphia's
downtown activity should not be broken up by garages.
In 2010, a developer argued that parking was in short supply
in the area and proposed that he build a parking garage, the problem was that
his site wasn't zoned for a garage.
Fearing the loss job opportunities, the permitting process was eased, an
excellent design team brought in to design and build it. As of now, and many of you may draw parallels
to our CentrePointe project, the Arch Street garage has brought no development,
no new shops or restaurants, and no good design.
Inga Saffron, the Philadelphia Inquirer Architecture Critic,
put it well, “… design will not save us from what's wrong with garages. The
real problem with these utilitarian structures - and we're talking about the
free-standing, aboveground kind, located in downtown settings - is that they
distort how the city functions.
Saffron goes on, “When you insert a garage on a dense,
pedestrian-friendly block, you can't help but dilute the mix by widening the
distance between people and their destinations. Meanwhile, new parking
encourages people to drive instead of taking transit, which only further
increases the demand for more parking. Putting garages underground, below
mixed-use buildings, is expensive, but at least it minimizes the harm.”
What does any of this mean in our preparing to plan for
our downtown's future? We are
approaching that point in the life of the 2007 Plan where, in past plans, the
reality completely obliterates some of the major assumptions of earlier
proposals. Are we about to lose a
concept of urban life that we have counted on or is it already gone and we
believe it dormant? Is there something
that we should be, or have been, planning for that will appear an oversight?
We can, as most other cities have, continue to plan for
how we think that life will remain in our fair city, or we can plan for how we
would like for Lexington
to be. We often promote Lexington as “unique” and it definitely is,
actually despite the repeated attempts to transplant ideas from other
communities. Progressive cities will ask
“What can we do that no other city has?” while we ask “Why can't we have that
in our city?” Are we willing to join the
progressive cities and ask the correct question?
I can understand our downtown developers using the
conventional wisdom of looking to the city government to build their structured
parking, but government is not building the parking lots of the suburban retail
stores. Cities used to believe that they
HAD to do this to aide in downtown revitalization. Our city is in the process of divesting
itself of all its parking garages and getting out of the parking business. To that I say a big “hooray”. Now the questions arise, “Should the Parking
Authority, the agency now in control of the downtown garages, consider building
expensive spaces for a society which may be trending away from requiring
them? Should the Parking Authority take
the gamble that a developer will not?
I guess, in the end, it all comes down to perceptions,
mostly based on past experiences. The
public believes that available downtown parking is hard to find or inconveniently
placed. The retailers believe that
parking should be provided for them.
Developers and landlords believe that they need assistance to serve
their clients. So, now I ask you; Do these perceptions trail the reality and
will these perceptions change with reality?
p.s. For further thoughts on parking planning go here
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