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YouTubePress Release wrote Mayor Announces New Plan for Downtown Parking
July 20, 2007
(Columbus) Addressing one of the top concerns of local business leaders this morning, Mayor Michael B. Coleman announced that the City and Capitol South would embark on a strategy to build two new parking garages downtown, adding some 1,400 spaces to improve the area for business and economic development. The plan will be advanced to Columbus City Council on July 23 by the Mayor and Councilmember Maryellen O’Shaughnessy, as Ordinance 1167-2007.
“Employers look at complex details when they decide where to locate a business, and they tell us that the price of parking is a key issue in downtown that can and must be dealt with,” said Mayor Coleman. “Our plan brings together public and private resources to build hundreds of new parking spaces in well built garages that will not only eliminate surface lots, but also be integrated into the area.”
The legislation would approve $600,000 for Capitol South to facilitate the design of two downtown parking facilities in the Fourth and Gay area and the RiverSouth District, just south of The Lazarus Building, and provide assistance to the City with respect to land acquisition. This funding will also be used to facilitate the creation of a special assessment district and non-school tax increment financing districts to support the construction and/or operation of such downtown parking facilities.
“The continued Downtown revitalization that we all support is going to require continuing attention to parking as well as attention to comprehensive urban transportation strategies,” said Councilmember Maryellen O’Shaughnessy, who served on the Downtown Parking Work Group and will sponsor the Council legislation in support of this project. “I’m looking forward to achieving a balance between the two.”
The City’s plan also addresses the changing dynamics of downtown, where hundreds of surface lot parking spaces are currently being eliminated to make room for new housing and development, such as the new Fourth and Gay neighborhood and the County Courthouse.
“Several exciting projects have begun to take shape recently. This is great news for downtown, but we need to be aware that construction will reduce the availability of surface parking, especially in our dense employment corridors,” said Guy V. Worley, CEO of Capitol South and Chair of the Downtown Parking Work Group. “Building parking garages in both the Fourth and Gay area and the RiverSouth District is necessary to the revitalization efforts downtown.”
The City of Columbus is helping lead the implementation of the Downtown Business Plan with CDDC and local businesses. 2007 marks the fifth year of the 10-year plan to bring new investment, energy and activity to downtown Columbus. There is a new market for downtown housing – with more than 4,700 housing units opened or opening soon, North Bank Park has opened, AEP’s Foundation and the City have committed $10 million each to the Scioto Mile Parks, and private partners are looking at developing acres of surface parking lots into new housing and retail throughout the district. Since 2002, the Mayor also has worked with 35 companies, keeping 583 jobs in the district and getting commitments for 2,385 more jobs to be created. The total new investment in downtown since 2000 is estimated at $2.19 billion, with $711 million in public funding helping leverage $1.48 billion in private investment. This includes projects proposed, under construction, or built since 2000.
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Mayor Announces New Plan for Downtown Parking
By: Walker
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When I left Columbus in 89, downtown didn’t seem to be lacking parking. In fact, I thought, at the time, that there were too many parking lots. Amazing, how things change.
Things haven’t changed. There is more parking than ever.
This still caters to the idea of driving everywhere and creating more places for cars and not people.
Urbanism and autocentrism are polar opposites.
Go to the top of the Rhodes Tower today (its free) and look out the window. Cars are the most frequent thing downtown. Its is looped by an innerebelt full of cars. Half the space is occupied by cars. The streets are full of ‘em
Downtown is overly accessible to cars already.
Coleman is probably going to demolish the LeVeque tower of the Statehouse to build his new garages.
… or just Google Earth Columbus. Still doesn’t seem to be lacking parking.
Also, why is Columbus expressing the desire to go green when building parking lots only encourages the burning of more fossil fuels?
As stated in the article, business leaders are demanding the parking. If businesses demanded streetcars then maybe we would get them. Downtown is till the central business ditrict and the City needs to do whatever possible to keep attracting employers.
This seems to me like exactly what the mayor is doing. If we get more businesses downtown, that only helps everything, right? Also, the way that I read it was that he was building these two big parking garages so that so many of those surface parking lots can be developed. Now I assume you would rather see a parking garage rather than surface lots.
I’ve never liked stand alone parking structures. I don’t mind, however, when those structures are part of a building.
I really do not want more cars around even if it “is good for business”.
There must not be a real need for garges if no private builder does it himself.
I would like a car-free district downtown.
I don’t think a private builder wants to do it because it’s cheaper to pave a cornfield in the burbs.
At this point, I don’t think downtown really need to lose any more businesses.
And garages are better than flat lots downtown.
Hopefully these parking structures can include ground-floor retail of some kind to mask their appearance at street level.
agreed on the ground floor retail, hide them as much as possible. i do partially agree that building more garages encourages people to keep driving, but i more strongly agree that building more garages helps for two reasons. one, the afformentioned fact that businesses need parking to grow or for other companies to relocate to this city, and two, it’s going to be a while before our society loses the vehicle for walking, biking or streetcars. it will slowly happen and it will take a long time, so for now the garages are a great idea.
as far as the downtown business plan, all things considered over the past five years, i think they are doing a hell of a job. seriously, take a snapshot of the city five to ten years ago and it looks completely different than today. only a couple more small highrises though, bummer.
Garages are better than lots and the areas they are mentioning are deeply needed. If you want more businesses to move downtown this is the process the city needs to take. Cars are not going to be reduced anytime soon. A garage is adding to the density of downtown by reducing surface lots for development and building the parking upwards.
I regularly hear people compare Columbus to NYC or Chicago or San Fran and try to claim that those cities have minimal parking garages in their prime real-estate locations downtown and instead have mass-transit systems, so that’s why Columbus should focus more on mass transit solutions and not parking garages that cater to automobiles.
The problem is that this is 2007, and the subways in New York were not built yesterday. If you compare to other similar-sized cities with similar problems, you can’t put all of your eggs in one basket with mass-transit and expect it to all work out in this day and age. People are married to their cars, and businesses are married to their employees. I think we can provide both transit options for both people and hopefully the trend will change over time.
Besides, parking sucks in New York, Chicago, and San Fran. In hindsight I bet most people wish they had more parking garage solutions in those cities in certain areas. Why can’t Columbus be a model for both parking solutions and mass transit. The more options the better as far as I’m concerned.
I agree walker, for one your not gonna be able to one day all of a sudden get everyone taking Cota downtown, for one the routes to do it just don’t exist right now, second a lot of people just won’t take it right now (maybe if the conditions change of course). Moving from surface lots to parking garages is just one more step along the journey, as we get back some space from the lots and move to higher density parking, that is a good thing for downtown and as density rises in general mass transit and the idea of not driving down town becomes more appealing meaning eventually the land might become to valuable to have a parking garage, but until them, good step i say.
This is the clincher for me. I think the design is not necessarily for downtown to lose parking, but to make its parking take up a smaller footprint, i.e., going vertical or (eventually) going subterranean.
It’s certainly possible to integrate a parking garage into an urban landscape without destroying the aesthetics of an entire city block. It just takes a little more creativity and a little more money. I think this thread was linked to on these boards a while ago, showing what people have done with garages in Miami Beach. A more Midwestern-style variation of this concept could work in Columbus.
When I was in France a couple of months ago there was a 5 story parking garage, all underground. On top of it, a park, just like the State House. I say, lets build down!
I guess it just needs to be made clear to the city what type of parking garages we want to see:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonathan_moreau/418008212/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/57822052@N00/495020727/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/humanedesign/84938857/
I’m in San Diego right now and spent most of the day walking around yesterday. I can’t say that I noticed more than a handful of parking lots. We just kept walking around and saying, “Every friggin block has high rise condos, hotels, or offices!” The two remaining surface lots we saw both had signs on them that said something like, “Future site of the new Hilton!” The signs all had renderings with a 30 story buildings on them.
There are some parking garages (especially around Petco Park) that were on the interior of blocks, or had street level retail (found a great gelato place in one of them), and all of them were around $20-30 to park there. You could only really notice the parking garages by the signs on the streets telling you where to pull in. Everything was concealed.
Bottom line, Columbus is spoiled with parking, and that’s not a good thing for a city. I’d personally like to know more about the plan than the aritlcle tells me. For example, what parking rates is the city trying to control to? How will these garages connect to, or be concealed from street level? How many spaces does the city project that we’re going to lose to development? Can revenues from large parking structures near COSI or Vets fund an East/West streetcar line and provide free fares to parkers?
That Sugarland Town Center place looks disquietingly like Easton … the whole modern brick look.
Brew: Don’t forget, in SD and other coastal cities that aren’t as land-rich as Columbus, development went vertical almost by necessity (and ditto the parking fares climbing to $30). I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people in those cities look at our $70/month spaces downtown with the same envy we look at their high-rises.
Columbus still has a substantial amount of room to grow. Keep in mind that we’re the 15th largest city in the country … and yet looking out from the roof of the Rhodes Tower, you’d really be surprised to hear that, given what you’d see past six blocks in any direction from that vantage, if that.