People who drive downtown will see some changes starting in September. The immediate change is the switch to paid parking in three central parking lots with about 330 spaces. The change that will take awhile to show up is the impact of approximately 340 new apartments planned along G Street, mostly without space for parking (the photo shows the demolition in progress on Aug. 5 of a former Davis Ace building, where some of the new apartments will be built). If the renters don’t bring cars, then this change should add more life to downtown without amping up the competition for a place to park. If.
Today on Davisville we talk about these changes with Brett Lee, executive director of the Davis Downtown Business Association (and a former mayor), and Trish Price, vice president of Bike Davis. As the discussion shows, these changes contain more nuance than might appear at first glance.
Comments
Why is cycling "alternate", Brett? Walking is normal... everything else is alternative....
Some stream of consciousness comments:
It is always amusing to me to hear from so many who think that we always must "grow." Our population should forever get larger. We need to always build more housing. Many of these same people then also insist that we have create forever more car parking..... and for “free". At a certain point, we'll need to pave over the whole place in order to store all the cars, right? Or we could build some multi-million-dollar parking structures…. For “free” parking. Why are we NOT putting significant effort into car-free access to our downtown? This concept that cars=business is absurd (proven by other studies not mentioned here... that people who arrive by bicycle spend more downtown per trip). But that seems to be the general feeling.
"Paid parking lowers retail sales." I'm sure that is true in some situations. But how much does car parking cost the city, and thus the tax-payers? Do we care that car parking is a net financial negative for the city even if it helps merchants at some level? And I know that the other thing that lowers retail sales is a downtown that is crushed with car danger and pollution.
Why are people driving a multi-ton car into downtown to have thier hair done?
Is Davis a big believer in bicycles? Or is Davis happy to have a "bike friendly” marketing reputation? They aren't the same.
Why do we normalize car parking as “parking? In some important locations, we are now out of “bike parking” but we only worry about the amount of car parking for some reason. Why worry about expensive car parking more than cheap bike parking when each device delivers (typically) a single shopper to the downtown?
Car parking is NOT available to all, as was stated as fact. Car parking is only available to those with cars. An important distinction, IMO.
5th street was not reduced form four lanes to two. It was increased from four lanes to 5. If that isn’t true, then we are motonormalizing yet again. Bike lanes are lanes too. And so is the center turn lane. Parking doesn’t mean cars. And lanes doesn’t mean cars.
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