Downtown New Albany merchants discuss parking; Two-hour parking restrictions relaxed.Non-enforcement is a persistent New Albanian way of life, but in this instance, it's being openly announced.
Many customers are having problems finding open parking spaces, and England said it’s an issue he is ready to address. He said two-hour parking regulations downtown along Market and Pearl streets have been lifted until further notice. He also said business owners and their employees need to park in paid city lots and not in front of store fronts.
“You’ve created a vibrant business area. People from Floyds Knobs and Louisville are coming downtown,” England told the business owners. “I have ordered the police department not to do anything in a four-block radius when it comes to parking. We want you all to police your own parking.”
My personal view is that it would be easier to train your cat not to chase mice than it is to succeed in convincing employees not to take the best customer parking spaces; it's generational, and hard-wired in their DNA. It's also never been an issue for me to walk a few blocks to get where I'm going. Then again, as often reminded, I'm "lucky" to be able to do that.
And, I live in Midtown.
Do we have any agreement on the best way forward for downtown parking, including business, pleasure and residential? What is being suggested by merchant self-enforcement?
If you have thoughts, please air them. There's something about this topic that confuses me, but I can't quite decide why that is.
5 comments:
You are not alone, as the economist Wilbur Thompson points out, "Much of the economics of the city is ‘public economics,’ and the pricing of urban public services poses some very difficult and even insurmountable problems."
Which is the same thing as saying that public parking confuses the hell out of everyone.
England seems to favor the Coase Theorem model (named after Ronald Coase), where the parties affected by the externalities negotiate a contract to solve the externality problem, or, as my 4 year old would say, "do nothing."
I am a fan of Coase as well in this situation. Oh, and two-way streets, of course.
Long ago a local business man listed a sure sign that revitalization is working as "There really is a parking problem."
A lot of hard work by a lot of good people is finally paying off.
Sharks vs. Jets, Pearl and Market, Saturday, noon.
If well choreographed gangland fighting doesn't solve it: Parking garage and, ultimately, public transportation.
Unfortunately, our regional powers that be thus far prefer to undercut any of that to the point of quelling discussion, robbing us of transportation choices by furthering our need for and near total dependence on even more parking, cars, gas, etc.
As was rightfully mentioned at the 8664 discussion at Destinations last night, it's difficult to create more sensible transportation solutions in an extremely localized portion of what has long functioned as a regional, no choice transportation quagmire.
My vote is to end the quagmire so that, having temporarily "solved" our local parking problem, we don't just end up having this same conversation over and over again, spending more and more time and money on the very same problem in response to our own subsidization of the things that create the problem.
Eventually, as petrol resources continue to dwindle and gas prices continue to increase, that choice will be made for us. The question is whether we'll be prepared for that or we'll have spent all of our money on short-sighted "solutions" that will then have lessened functional value to go along with the unsustainable high costs of maintaining them.
As centrally located as we are, there is simply no good reason a car and an accompanying parking space for it should be a requirement to visit downtown New Albany for a few hours.
So, do we actually want to work to solve the problem over the long term or do we want to keep spinning our wheels (bad pun) under the assumption that we are, as a region, incapable of doing so? That answer will greatly affect the answer to "What do we do about downtown parking?"
"Eventually, as petrol resources continue to dwindle and gas prices continue to increase, that choice will be made for us. The question is whether we'll be prepared for that or we'll have spent all of our money on short-sighted "solutions" that will then have lessened functional value to go along with the unsustainable high costs of maintaining them."
That is the essential question, Jeff, and the main reason problems such as parking seem "very difficult and even insurmountable" to economists and transportation planners. And they will continue to be so long as all of our resources are tied solely to the automobile, which you point out very succinctly. As much as I like 8664, it is still not THE regional transportation plan, nor does it offer any alternatives or sustainable solutions to regional transit problems. Once again, the dying show remains on the road. If 8664 were implemented tomorrow, Louisville would still be at least 25 years behind a city like Cincinnati, which is by no means a bastion of modern planning. Louisville had a real transportation plan called T2, by the way, that seems to have been all but forgotten, after it was slaughtered by Ann Northrup and some of her pavement friendly cohorts.
Speaking of solutions, though, I read an account recently about the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World's Fair in NYC, where the first interstate highway plans were unveiled (funded by General Motors, and designed by Norman Bel Geddes). This is from the Tom Lewis book Divided Highways.
In General Motors' and Bel Geddes vision, replanning and rebuilding the city would take place simultaneously with highway building. The profession of urban planning had developed in the twenties largely in response to the chaotic conditions of American cities. By 1939, New Deal planners had begun to focus on solutions to the problem of urban "blight." Many of those who had stood in line at the Futurama exhidbit had taken the subway to the fair from crowded appartments in Manhattan, Brooklyn, or the Bronx. They were dazzled by the idea of a city of the sort Bel Geddes had created. In the Futurama there were three separate units, "residential, commercial and industrial." Instead of walking to work or to the store, Americans in 1960 would depend on a "highly developed modern traffic system" of "wide open thoroughfares" that displaced "outmoded business sections and undesirable slum areas." Workers would live in new suburbs, accessible only by automobile, with better homes, parks, schools, and healthful surroundings. The connection was complete: Automobiles--and a modern highway system on which they traveled--would solve urban problems.
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