Parking for a small business district

Visitor Question: We have a nice business district of maybe five good blocks of small, mom and pop, mostly locally owned businesses and restaurants. We struggle to get the parking right. Our buildings are moderately historic, from the 1930s through 1950s. This has led us to try to create some historic atmosphere and to shun parking garages.

How can we make our surface parking less obtrusive, and still serve our customers? It seems like people still want suburban style parking in front of the businesses, but our stores and restaurants are built out to the sidewalk, and we can't do that. What are other business districts doing?

Editors Reply: Know that you are not alone in this struggle. In fact, most traditional business districts deal with a need for parking, questions about how to price the parking, dilemmas about its location, and also with public perception of a need for parking that may far exceed the reality.

Studies consistently show that it is rarely the case that "there is no place to park." My first advice is to do a little objective research to see how much of an issue your parking needs are. You could enlist a group of volunteers to walk or drive around to note how many empty spaces exist at certain times of the day and week, and where exactly they are located. This gives you some data that you could use either to plan corrective actions or to argue in your marketing efforts that actually there is plenty of parking if you look in the right places and avoid a few problem times of the week.

However, as hinted already, that only deals with part of the problem. The other significant element is perception. The research into perception requires a little more effort, but it is doable. You could enlist volunteers to stop people on the sidewalk in your business district to ask them if they had any trouble parking, where they ended up, and how they feel about it. This will give you a mountain of attitudinal data. What it will not do, of course, is intercept the people who avoided patronizing your business district because they dreaded parking difficulties.

Armed with both the quantitative and qualitative information about the parking situation, you can then proceed to a discussion of how to resolve the problem, if indeed your business group finds that there is a real problem.

In effect, you asked how to make your parking lots look better. Three answers to that question are screening, fencing, and landscaping. Just to complicate things for a second, screening can involve either a tall fence, such as a residential privacy fence, or tall landscaping. In many cases, complete screening is just not practical, either because of space limitations or considerable expense. Another consideration is that some shoppers would say that the lack of visibility into the parking lot makes them feel less safe.

In those situations, often the best solution is landscaping. Choose a variety of low-maintenance shrubs, providing for color in every season to the extent possible. Landscaping softens the look of hard pavement and also provides variety and unpredictability that please the eye.

This solution becomes problematic when the parking lot surface and existing parking plan come right up to the sidewalk, meaning you don't have the three to five foot wide strip available for planting shrubs. This is when we might turn to some sort of attractive low fencing, 2 to 4 feet high, to make the lot look more purposeful and enhance the feeling of whatever historical period you want to capture. I am thinking of a beautiful wrought iron fence or a western-style wood fence, for example. You could even do a low solid wall from a material compatible with your town, such as brick, adobe, or stone.

You will need to discuss how much you would like to maintain the historic pattern of storefronts extending out to the sidewalk, and if so, whether there are areas at the rear of buildings that are suitable for the development of an additional attractive, unified surface lot or even a garage.

We applaud the wish to preserve your current building pattern, which is conducive to pleasant window shopping and also brings the automobile traffic closer to the store windows. If you start removing buildings to provide parking, you risk less architectural coherence, a less charming environment for your customers, and lower demand because there are fewer places to shop.

In my opinion, parking garages behind the buildings are not necessarily a terrible addition if you are careful about the materials and architecture. If you want to pursue this option, involve an architect who is sensitive to the ambiance of your business district, and charge that architect with maintaining an appearance and a scale compatible with the rest of the district. Also if you are interested in this solution, think early and often about how you will preserve a sense of pedestrian safety in and around the garage; too often I have seen that topic become an after-thought.

However, garages are quite expensive additions to your district, so you would need to involve your city government and coax them into using some of their powers to create special taxing districts or issue bonds. In this conversation, you will have to become very clear about whether this parking garage is free or whether there is a small or medium-sized fee.

Here I have chosen to discuss parking garages generically, but just know that usually underground parking garages are even more costly and problematic than above-ground structures.
By the way, research shows that women customers are not crazy about either type of parking garage.

Another factor to consider is the current and future functioning of any on-street parking you may have. If you have wide streets of four lanes or more going through the district, with limited or no on-street parking, you might want to discuss narrowing the street to two lanes, or two lanes plus a turning lane, to make room for parking.

The question of parking meters or free on-street parking is just as tricky as the issue of parking garage cost. I believe that in a metro area where you are competing with other somewhat similar business districts, the lack of parking meters attracts some potential customers. On the other hand, of course metered parking generates some revenue and also discourages staying too long in one space.

Whether you choose a more unified, larger parking lot, a parking garage, or more on-street parking, you need to deal up front with the problem of employees or contractors who are in the habit of taking the best parking spots for themselves. That has to stop. Enlist all the business owners to hold their employees accountable if they take spots designated for customers. Of course, this means that there must be an allowance for employee parking, but you can configure this on the periphery of the business district or even off site completely if the walking distances are manageable. Where there is reasonable public transportation to your district, encourage employees to provide incentives for employee use of transit.

It would be great to tell you, "Here's what other districts are doing. Follow this prescription, and all will be well."

However, the solutions need to be hammered out locally, both because each situation is quirky and because businesses and the community need buy-in for your ultimate solution.

Just don't let architectural incompatibility stop you. Keep working toward good design solutions, and they will be there most of the time.

Join GOOD COMMUNITY PLUS, which provides you monthly with short features or tips about timely topics for neighborhoods, towns and cities, community organizations, and rural or small town environments. Unsubscribe any time. Give it a try.