Saturday, November 07, 2009
Downtown development needn't cause a parking nightmare
From the RoundTable blog
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Jeremy Holmes
Holmes is the program director of RIDE Solutions in Roanoke.
Recent days have seen two interesting developments for downtown Roanoke. The first was the welcome announcement that Ed Walker, father of the Cotton Mill Lofts and the Hancock Building, has purchased the redoubtable Patrick Henry Hotel. Walker made clear in his morning press conference that, whatever else happens with the building, we could count on at least 100 new apartments being at the core of the project, significantly growing downtown's residential capacity.
Second, The Roanoke Times offered a piece on upcoming construction in downtown's core: the Market Building, Farmer's Market and Center in the Square. The piece paints a grim picture of how the three massive construction projects could hurt the businesses that rely on them, even as they work to improve the buildings they are housed in.
Valley Business Front's Dan Smith added to this in a recent blog post, pointing out how the construction will result in "vanishing parking spaces in a place that is often a parking challenge."
There are a few issues worth discussing in the context of these developments, and most of them have to do with parking. With downtown residential capacity booming, attention must be paid to potential parking conflicts with existing commuters and shoppers. I'm sure Walker has a sense of where those 100 apartment dwellers are going to put their cars, and it probably doesn't involve building a new lot.
One way to address this is to make sure those 100 new apartment dwellers don't need a car. Downtown Roanoke is already one of the largest, if not the largest, trip generator in the region, particularly if you include Carilion Roanoke Memorial and the Riverside Center as part of downtown. Investments in express transit and bike connections could reinforce the idea that you're supposed to get into and out of downtown in something other than your car.
Attracting basic amenities like a grocery store and pharmacy would reduce the need for urban dwellers to have to drive to nearby shopping centers, further encouraging them to ditch the car altogether. To seal the deal, the introduction of a car-sharing program such as Zipcar or U Car Share could replace car ownership with a more sustainable and less parking-intensive option.
Not only would downtown residents be able to do without a car, but downtown employees would have access to the carshare for meetings and other day trips, allowing them to ride the bus, carpool, walk or bike to work and further reduce trips into downtown and parking demand.
It seems that the vision of downtown Roanoke as a bustling, vital and thriving urban center is not going to come to fruition unless we anticipate the transportation impacts and avoid the pitfalls of traffic and parking congestion that go with them. I'd hate to see Walker or other developers have to turn grand, old buildings into unproductive parking decks to support the revitalization of the valley's urban core, as there's nothing less vital than hundreds of empty cars.
Local governments have a responsibility in this. A careful review of parking regulations and rates need to be made. We need to decide if the current structure of rates is incentivizing the right behavior -- are we retaining our parking space for visitors, shoppers and tourists? Are we dedicating it to commuters who leave their cars sitting idle for most of the day? All localities in the valley -- city and county -- need to expand transportation options.
Would putting more money into express transit routes or shorter headways on Valley Metro buses be more effective use of public dollars than dealing with traffic congestion, road maintenance, parking maintenance and construction, or the loss of tax revenue that could have been generated from commercial or real estate property that would instead need to be used as parking?
Downtown employers need to advocate and fund transportation options as well. Carilion Clinic and Jefferson College have set the bar with their support of the Star Line Trolley, which has been wildly successful. More employers could get in that game.
Or, they could simply look at existing incentives -- implementing a pre-tax commuter choice transit benefit could be an easy way to encourage ridership that would essentially fund the growth in regional transit service by increasing fare box revenues rather than by subsidizing free services.
Offering the pre-tax commuter choice parking benefit to carpoolers and vanpoolers could incentivize intelligent use of parking. There's even a new bicycle commuter benefit that works much the same way.
As The Roanoke Times article points out, the next two to three years are going to see some big disruptions in our urban core. How we come out of that may be determined, to some extent, by how easy we make it for commuters and shoppers to get into and stay in downtown.
