Style ran a complaint letter today from a west ender who made her request known for improving Shockoe Bottom [emphasis mine]:
What I and all of my group want is not anything different than what is already being offered, it is improvement on what is being offered, with the main component being parking and free parking. Everyone in the West End I talk to wonders why no one gets it.
One of the main features that separates cities from suburbs is density. Stores, offices & housing are located close together, creating a visually interesting landscape. And more importantly, density makes it possible to walk from one shop to another, or from your house to your office. Density also makes transit economically feasible.
Parking lots tear holes in the urban fabric, make it harder to walk from one place to another, create stormwater runoff, contribute to the urban heat island effect, and are generally unpleasant to look at.
Shockoe Bottom is not a strip mall. It’s not a mall at all. It’s part of the urban fabric, and as such, driving from the suburbs and parking for free should not be its main goal. Shockoe shouldn’t look like this:
Downtown is already saturated with parking lots.
Everyone I talk to who lives in the city wonders why suburbanites don’t get it. If you want “parking and free parking,” don’t come downtown- go to the suburbs. There’s plenty of bars and clubs there.
There are already entire city blocks in the Bottom dedicated to nothing but parking. Don’t further destroy our city to cater to those addicted to their cars.
Unfortunately, according to Style, some of our urban businesses are struggling financially so much that they want to create suburbia in the midst of downtown:
…some merchants are working on solutions to the parking dilemma because this is the complaint they hear most often, from Carytown to Church Hill… As they fight off the suburban franchise mentality, many realize that those vast, treeless shopping mall parking lots are often what separates red and black on the bottom line.
September 5, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Maybe they should be asking their county board of supervisors/transportation commissioner why there is not adequate public transport to get them downtown rather than relying on their godawful SUVs?
But I guess that would be asking too much?
*grumbles about suburban car addiction*
How does one go about winning suburbanites’ hearts and minds re. public transit, that is the question? And then how do we convince the counties to get on board with helping to fund it?
September 5, 2007 at 2:15 pm
I agree. No more parking lots. More mass transit.
VCU is especially guilty of using urban neighborhoods as it’s parking lots. Its squeezing out citizens and other customers.
September 5, 2007 at 3:17 pm
What the merchants that insist on more parking don’t understand is that more parking spaces LEADS TO “the suburban franchise mentality.” They will just make the area MORE attractive to viral franchises by adding parking spaces…
The scientifically impossible I do right away
The spiritually miraculous takes a bit longer
September 5, 2007 at 6:56 pm
[...] more parking garages going to solve the parking problems caused by VCU? I don’t think [...]
September 5, 2007 at 11:14 pm
If the city was smart, it would push for sharing of parking decks that are closed up at night. There’s ABSOLUTELY NO GOOD REASON why the massive state parking deck at 15th and Main should sit empty and locked up all night after state employees leave. That deck has something like 1,400 spaces in there and it’s only a few block walk to almost anywhere in Shockoe Bottom…. (nevermind the fact that the deck creates a void in the pedestrian’s streetscape by having NO streetlevel uses integrated into it whatsoever.)
The $1 deck in the Slip is incredibly popular… We use it every time we head down there for a night out and to pay a buck is nothing! Why the same concept can’t be replicated elsewhere, using decks that normally sit empty at night or are overpriced would really help. We definitely don’t need more parking lots.
September 14, 2007 at 12:13 pm
That would definitely make a lot of sense, richmondpics!
How do we convince the relevant parties of this though?
February 10, 2009 at 8:22 am
The city NEEDS parking for its EMPLOYEES! Not all of us can ride a bus (some of us live in the country and commute!) Working downtown sucks bigtime!