Last week the N&O ran an article about the excess of parking available downtown, “Parking is here, but cars are not”. The point is that many people, particularly those who work downtown, take up the free on-street parking and avoid the parking decks. Given the number of new parking decks recently added or planned, most decks are under utilized.
But no new parking decks are planned for the city’s premier entertainment district of Glenwood South, where finding a place to park has never been easy. And the parking problem will likely get much worse with the planned hotel to be built on the northeast corner of Glenwood Avenue and West Johnson Street. The owners of the planned 160 room hotel are expected to take up to a third of the currently available spaces at the only large public deck in the area.
A solution is needed before the problem gets much worse, as five more restaurants are coming to the area, including the recently announced Diner, another pizza restaurant called Bada Bing, and a collection of three restaurants at 500 Glenwood Avenue.
And, we can expect the pressure on available parking to continue increasing as the economy and consumer confidence improves for the existing 35 establishments and as tenants are found for the available retail space in the 222 Glenwood and West buildings.
New parking standards, championed by local restaurant owners, severely reduces the number of parking spaces that future restaurant and retail developers will need to include in their site plans. In most cases, not requiring these establishments to provide any parking at all for patrons. The city’s intent to encourage people to use mass transit or simply leave their cars at home is simply not realistic when these options remain out of reach to the vast majority of people who frequent the retail establishments in Glenwood South.
What do you think about the parking situation in Glenwood South? We welcome your comments.
The parking strategy adopted in October last year by the city that concluded that there was more than enough parking in the Glenwood South area was based on a field study conducted in the fall of 2007. The study of available and occupied parking spaces within the Glenwood South entertainment district (blocks adjacent to Glenwood Avenue between Peace and Hillsborough Streets) showed parking utilization ranges of only 30-50%. The study was conducted during week day afternoons, and failed to take into account the time sensitivity of parking demand, where retail establishments focus mainly on evening and particularly weekend late night offerings.
The last sentence in the comment above is incorrect. Please see Page V-45 of the Parking Study which summarizes the results of the dinner-hour and late-night parking utilization surveys in the Glenwood South area.
These days, I recommend just parking in a (free)deck downtown and riding the (free)R-Line to Glenwood. It’s easy and adds at most 10-15 minutes to the trip.
Comment provided by Gordon Dash, Parking Administrator for the City of Raleigh: The new parking rates and the expansion of metered parking should significantly increase the demand for off-street parking which is where the long term parkers need to be. This, in turn, would stimulate more interest by private developers and entrepreneurs to build and operate more decks which, if operated properly, can be a great business opportunity and revenue generator. This is already the case in many cities that now have healthy parking programs of which Charlotte,Savannah and Charleston are good examples. I do not envision the City continuing to build and operate decks much farther into the future as we are already under a heavy debt load for the next 15 years. Only one of our 8 decks is paid off and the structural maintenance and repair budget grows larger as the decks get older. Parking is a very costly service to provide which I don’t think the public still realizes. The overall health of a parking system in a growing city is dependent on the growth of alternative transportation modes and changing people’s thinking that their car is the only option. I think we are moving forward on this quite well with CAT and TTA.