An argument in favor of shared parking

Last Sunday I was walking from my place to the London Tea Room. I went the long way to look at old cars lined up on 17th for the Veteran’s Parade.  So I crossed through CPI’s parking lot which is just North of my building.

I noticed a driver get into an SUV after pulling two notes off the window.  Pulling away I saw the car pictured above with the same notes. Basically CPI doesn’t like residents from surrounding buildings parking on their lot overnight.  I was very pleased to see the notes could be easily removed rather than those requiring elbow grease and a razor blade.

But it brings up a question about how we use our land.  The above image shows their parking lot thinning about 4pm on Monday. Washington Ave runs left to right in the background.  !7th Street and CPI’s building are on the left.  This is one of four parking lots for CPI.

The parking lot continues over to 16th Street (right).  The massive Ely-Walker building is across 16th. It has underground garage parking but I think some residents have more than one car per unit.

What I’d like to see is shared use of the lot.  For a fee, a fixed number of residents could be allowed to use CPI’s lot from 5pm -7am weekdays and 24/7 on weekends. I hate seeing this lot sit mostly vacant evenings and weekends.

Ideally CPI would do well to explore ways to reduce the number of employee’s vehicles each day. Offer employee’s $25/month if they didn’t bring their car to work.  This would prompt some to look at transit or carpooling.   The money paid out to employee’s would come in from fees collected from others using the parking on off hours.

A CPI-sponsored WeCar vehicle (car sharing from Enterprise) could help employees that use transit or carpool if they need a car to run errands at lunch.  The many residents living in this part of downtown might become members as well.  The nearest WeCar to us is 7-8 blocks away.  With a close WeCar some 2-car households might drop down to one and some one-car households might go to zero.  A sponsor covers the cost each month if a vehicle is not rented by members often enough each month.

Promotional video from Enterprises’ WeCar program:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDhHo3bJ9bM

Know that I’m not picking on CPI — they are a good neighbor.  I’m just suggesting ways in which they might alter how they view the land around their building used for car storage.

– Steve Patterson

Drivers fail to stay within parking space

From my desk at home I can see Locust Street in my peripheral vision through the glass door to my balcony.  As I see movement on the street I’ll glance over that direction.  More often than not when someone parks at the on-street metered space they fail to keep their car behind the parking meter.

When you parallel park sometimes you have no choice but to be off a bit based on the cars in front of and behind your own.  But this space I see off to my left is the one space between our drive and the next corner.   Everyone just pulls front-forward into this space.  And yet most don’t get it right.

Some cities, such as Clayton, mark on the pavement the allotted space where you are to park.

You can sorta see the parking meter in the above picture.

From the sidewalk you see this driver had nothing to prevent parking properly.

And yet the driver missed it by a long shot.  OK, you are right, in this location it doesn’t matter because the city foolishly has too few spaces.  At 11am early in the week there are not many cars around.  The commercial spaces on the 1st floors are vacant at the moment and on the weekends the street is full, especially if a neighbor is having a party.

This bad habit, repeated daily, makes me wonder if drivers need those pavement markings on the street in order to park properly?  But I also think drivers are better at parking naturally.  If we had a “pay-n-display” parking system, where the parking space length isn’t pre-determined by the meter spacing, our drivers would do a better job of parking.

In the meantime I’ll just try to resist the urge to leave these drivers a note saying, “Align the meter with the front of the car, not the side mirror.”

– Steve Patterson

A Vintage Parking Garage

Downtown St. Louis has many parking garages, too many in fact.  Most are as bland as you’d expect a parking garage to be.

The curving exit ramp of the Macy’s garage at 6th & Pine (map link) is anything but bland.

One of the two Kiener Plaza garages are visible from the exit ramp of the Macy’s garage, above.

It is hard to sustain a vibrant downtown with so much real estate used for car storage.  We built garages to accommodate everyone coming downtown but in the process created a downtown less attractive to visitors.

I just hope nobody gets the idea to list one on the National Register of Historic Places.  Wait, the city likes to raze historic buildings so perhaps we should get all of them on the register.  That may be the only way to reduce their numbers.

– Steve Patterson

Stop the Dust

Many fought hard to keep the 1960s San Luis Apartments at Lindell and N. Taylor (map link).  The battle, however, was lost and the demolition crews have been busy razing the structure.  Little remained on Thursday:

Above: we can see the spray of water as the building was being wrecked.  The water spray didn’t appear to be effective in other directions.  Driving through the area you could see dust everywhere.

Neighbors (presumably) expressed their view on the alley side of the old garage being razed.

The dust will end once the building is fully razed.  And just think, they won’t need any help from construction noise since the St. Louis Archdiocese is paving the prominent corner to store cars.

– Steve Patterson

Preferred Parking for Hybrids

Out of Chicago comes an interesting discussion – preferred parking for hybrid vehicles in the retail environment. Apparently Whole Foods is attempting to receive a LEED rating for their new stores, and one way they’re doing this is by designating parking spots near the front door for the exclusive use of hybrid vehicles.  Chicago Tribune articles here and here.   And yes, the LEED process does give points for providing preferred parking for alternative-fuel vehicles.

Most of the previous applications I’ve seen have been in places of employment, where the goal is to wean commuters away from their single-occupant vehicles. I don’t have much of an issue with providing preferences in this environment, since providing and enforcing them over time seem to be two very different things. Seeing this applied in a retail situation is, to me, a much different dynamic, much like my negative reaction to designated parking for new or expectant moms – any time you designate spaces for specific uses, you both diminish the actual supply (since most “special” spots are rarely fully-utilized) and you force everyone else further out.

We can obviously discuss the larger issues of whether free parking should be limited by the government (to force people to use other modes) and how free parking is making most of us fatter and lazier, but I’d like to focus on the apparent movement away from everyone being considered equal. We already provide special parking for people with documented disabilities, as we should. And I don’t have a problem with any business providing reserved parking for anyone they choose – it’s their land, their money and their business model. But I do take exception with any public program that creates special incentives without a strong basis in reality.

Short term, these spaces may provide a small incentive for some people to consider more-efficient vehicles, much like how “compact” spaces were meant to encourage people to buy smaller vehicles. Longer term, as hybrids become more common, the Law of Unintended Consequences WILL kick in. Much like how many cities have seen increased demand for hybrids when they can be driven by solo drivers in HOV lanes, or how transit agencies in Illinois have had to accommodate the unfunded mandate of allowing all seniors to ride for free, these spaces will soon become oversubscribed.

Where this issue stands now is in sort of a gray area – it’s not the law of the land, yet, but I can see it becoming that fairly quickly. Whole Foods has every right to do this; the real issue comes down the road, where LEED compliance is either mandated by local legislation, or, as is the case in Chicago, going green gets you an expedited permitting process. And I’m not aware of any applications around here (yet), but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it tried fairly soon.

– Jim Zavist