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Press 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.
Comments
- cheap: i highly recommend the Millersport sweet corn festival of course,the cor
- Jimmy Mak: Thanks for the write-up! Just to clarify - this is the third year we've do
- Briana Henry: Well, eventually they plan to add more bands from the region...gotta start
- bucki12: I like the business model, but the internet sales part seems like something
- racheltb: I don't see the Ohio Shrimp Fest on the list. It is truly a good time. h
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Mayor Announces New Plan for Downtown Parking
By: Walker
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That would explain why all those west coast urbanites are flocking to Columbus. I can’t throw a stone without hitting one of them…or a parking lot.
Friday, July 20, 2007
By Robert Vitale
Mayor Michael B. Coleman announced plans this morning for two parking garages that will add 1,400 spaces to a Downtown seen as pinched for parking.
The garages will go up at sites near 4th and Gay streets and southwest of the redeveloped Lazarus building. The city has yet to purchase the sites, but Coleman said the garages will open in 2009.
There’s disagreement among people whether the problem with Downtown parking is a lack of spaces or a lack of convenient spaces.
But Coleman said some construction projects Downtown are erasing surface parking. He said the city also is trying to look at parking more strategically.
READ MORE
Saturday, July 21, 2007
By Robert Vitale
Ten parking lots displaced by Downtown development projects will be replaced with two city-financed garages by 2009.
It might mean fewer spaces — about 1,400 are coming and about 1,500 going away — but Mayor Michael B. Coleman said yesterday that the net result will be a plus for Columbus.
He called the plans “a giant step” toward putting Downtown parking where the greatest demand is and toward replacing “acres of surface lots” that could be put to better use.
The new garages will go up near 4th and Gay streets, and southwest of the redeveloped Lazarus building on S. High Street. They will replace spaces lost to planned town houses and condominiums in the first location and to a new Franklin County courts building in the second.
Kyle Ezell, an Ohio State University lecturer in city planning and an advocate of urban living, said Columbus is heading in the right direction if it consolidates surface-lot parking into multistory garages.
READ MORE
I do like the idea of garages, for the reasons already mentioned here, but what I think would be cool is if they could simultaneously create facilities for active commuters. Like you could put bike lockers & showers (among other things like shops, eateries, a daycare, etc) on the ground floor of a garage, to both accommodate cars and encourage people not to use them — especially if we’re losing parking spots with this new arrangement. We can start transitioning to a more car-lite culture here fairly easily, it seems to me.
Where is Downtown “pinched” for parking? Ive never had a problem finding some place to park. I wouldve thought we had an overabundance of parking?
I think that parking is only a big problem in the Short North area. There’s few surface lots, few garages, and few public parking spots. And we’re not going to have any sort of solution available in that area for another year when the Urban Oasis public garage goes in adding a whopping 250 spots. We needed an extra 250 spots in the Short North 3 years ago. Who knows what we’ll need next year when we finally get these.
As for downtown, I agree that parking isn’t a huge problem today. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be prepared for change. The new Edwards project is going to take up 9 city blocks, almost all of which are parking spots. According to that Dispatch article I posted earlier, 1,500 parking spots are going away downtown in the next year and a half. These parking garages being planned aren’t going to help us with parking, they’re going to give us 1,400 spots back, barely even maintaining the status quo.
If we don’t do SOMETHING ahead of time, we’re likely to have a similar parking problem with what the Short North is facing. And I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d rather fix a problem ahead of time with proper planning instead of waiting until the problem turns into an emergency before we even start to think about doing something about it.
I really see this as a great display of the whole “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”. People will scream at the city for allowing the parking problem in the Short North to get so bad and not doing anything about it until now, and then turn around and scream at the city for trying to build parking garages downtown ahead of the curve when a lot of parking spaces are in the process of disappearing.
:roll:
Dont get me wrong, Im much more in favor of having a few garages than 100 surface lots
I’m not sure if this is a partial solution or not, but doe anyone think that Columbus is ready for a “park-n-ride” strategy to offset the parking dilema?
Placing a parking lot in a central location outside downtown, where a bus shuttles suburbanites into and out of the city.
Why a bus? Why not rail? 8)
I used to think that park-and-rides were good solutions, but after chatting with some people who shared a different outlook with me, you’re really just creating an ugly parking garage with a transit station attached in the suburbs, so why not create other amenities to go with it. Promote mixed-use development no matter if it’s downtown or in the burbs.
I’m all for park-and-ride stations if they wind up looking more like Easton and less like a plain old concrete garage.
:D
I could deal with park & rides…I’d just like to have some sort of COTA service by my office. I work on Dublin Rd near Grandview and we don’t have any public transit service (an express bus from Dublin uses this corridor, but doesn’t stop along it). As someone who periodically has to go downtown for meetings or other work, I have to admit to having some mixed feelings about parking being wiped out downtown — I like seeing downtown be developed, but it does make my life more difficult if a lot of parking disappears.
But more adequate public transit which would allow for me to get downtown and back to the office without needing to take my car would deal with much of that problem.
I’d also like some lunch options within walking distance, but that’s a topic for another day :wink:
Grove city has a park and ride right off stringtown road, but only a handful of people use it. Its really sad.
I love this idea, and I had heard it before from someone else. I live just close enough to consider walking/running/biking to work, but there is no place to shower/change when I get in. I think Chicago has been working on this, but we are by no means at their capacity for urban travelers yet, so who knows. Here’s to dreaming.
i don’t think the showers would work. i mean, would you want to walk out of your shower stall and see johnny the homeless vagrant staring at your junk. personally, i’m not into it.
well, yes, i can see how that would be a problem! but public showers would really be more of a gym-type thing, except with no gym. like you could buy a membership and there would be a staff there to ensure security and cleanliness. and to kick out the homeless vagrants…
I think it looks like the city is turning surface lots into residential units and replacing lost parking with garages: a very strong step forward.
What worries me is the apparent haste and lack of transparency of the project. It says to me that the city is going to sacrifice design considerations (ex. garage concealment, ability to incorporate in future transit projects) for the sake of getting the project built before opposition brings it to a crawl.
If opposition to a project is strong enough to bring even its transparent permutations to a crawl, then perhaps the project should rightly be cut down. The caveat here is that opposition groups must be savvy enough to communicate with those people who are in a position to transform the project, so as their opposition is constructive rather than so much trolling.
As for the proposal written above for a COTA park and ride system–such a system already exists. There are park and rides all over the city and suburbs, but they are rarely used. I believe this is because of two factors: (1) the bus routes throughout the entire city are so poorly planned and poorly connected that the COTA system is essentially a non-service, and (2) it is still many times more time-efficient to drive anywhere in the city rather than make the fatal mistake of deciding to rely on COTA’s bus service, the place where the upwardly mobile and employed go to die.
This second factor is brought about by budget and capital constraints placed on COTA. I do not, however harsh as the opinion is, believe that COTA’s team of staff has demonstrated that it is competent enough to warrant the removal of those restraints: in a free market, power and resources flow to those who utilize them (and jockey for the right to do so) most efficiently. COTA, has demonstrated time and time again, that it does not cut the cake.
Therefore, in my opinion, the best possible remedy to Columbus’ transit woes is to let COTA die. There is obviously a need for transit, which COTA has failed to serve. That need, much like the average car-less Columbus commuter, is not going anywhere.
Building upward downtown and shifting parking to where it is needed, as Capital South is doing, will provide sufficient infrastructure for a more nimble, efficient central business district. Curing Columbus’ transit woes will require constant, active involvement from the entire community.