Above Ground Parking Garages for Towers

[Geographer]

I find the proliferation of above ground parking pedestals for recent towers to be ugly. A boring, lifeless garage contributes nothing to vibrant streets that we all want downtown. Do any other city's towers make routine use of parking pedestals? Should Austin ban them?

[Sigaven]

Agreed. They suck away life from the street.

[We vs us]

Yeah, agreed, they're pretty awful. I don't think they should be banned outright -- they're evil but necessary for life in a city that hasn't transitioned out of car culture. But that doesn't mean I have to like them.

[loonytoony]

While ugly, they do serve a purpose. Until we get away from car culture we'll keep seeing them. Also keep in mind it's cheaper to build up than down - so while not the most interactive they will help keep cost of living (slightly!) lower downtown. The ancillary benefit is more people able to afford living/working in region.

[zrx299]

We as a society won't be getting rid of car culture (outside of obvious places like NYC, etc) in our lifetimes. The fix involves enormous capital expenditures to actually build a real public transportation system with dedicated ROWs, and behavioral changes. It's a real chicken/egg thing.

Otherwise, Bob and Karen will always need a place to park their car when commuting in from Georgetown and Hutto.


A more realistic solution is enforcing better design guidelines. There's plenty of ways to disguise parking decks, provide ground floor retail, and activate the street level.

[loonytoony]

Agreed on the design aspect. On the public transport side I'd say our biggest issue is space. We simply have too much room to build and spread in the US. It's easy to point to Europe or similar for examples on what we can do here. However, these are areas with high population densities, relatively small distances between towns, and a long tradition or walking/biking/using public transport. Until we start seeing something similar here I see no other way but a continuation of car culture.

[freerover]

Some of the podiums seem worse than they really are. Those quarter block towers are really narrow and the parking slopes are highly inefficient because of the limited amount of continuous slope. You're pretty much always rounding a corner which doesn't leave room for a lot of spaces relative to half and full block podiums.

[427MM]

We could count above ground parking of any kind against FAR (Floor to Area Ratio). Some business groups are against this but it could help move the needle.

[freerover]

Originally Posted by 427MM

We could count above ground parking of any kind against FAR (Floor to Area Ratio). Some business groups are against this but it could help move the needle.

We should deliver a quality transit system before taking away necessary support for badly needed office space that central to the economic growth and diversification of the Austin economy.

[Geographer]

I agree that most people will continue to drive to work and thus parking is necessary. But there are other ways to provide parking.

Should the city of Austin require underground parking?

[HomeInMyShoes]

We've got a few in Regina and most are actually pretty well done from a streetscape standpoint and are actually better than many of the underground structure buildings. Two have restaurants in the bottom and a third has an optical shop.

Avord Tower which is cleanly designed and well-maintained. Great local coffee shop too.

Noroth Canadian Oils has another great restaurant/coffee shop (local again) and the design while not beautiful at least works with the rest of the structure fairly well and at least has some design thought to it.

You won't get people to stop driving to work for a while, but you can make designs reasonable and still preserve some of the pedestrian interaction that is nice in the core.

[freerover]

I think a better conversation would be how the city can develop some system for the public to utilize all these private parking garages in a more seamless way so we can lose more street parking for bigger sidewalks, protected bike/scooter lanes and transit lanes. It would be nice if there was a central way to pay and a way to know what garages had openings. I posted a parking study last year that IIRC, said there was a ton of under utilized parking garages.

I agree that coming up with design guidelines would be better. I think the Parsley Oil building went from a terrible podium to a great one. I think the Austonian's podium looks fine. There should be a way to prevent builders from going with the cheapest route possible when it comes to ventilation on the podiums like we saw with 3rd and Schoal.

[zrx299]

Originally Posted by freerover

I think a better conversation would be how the city can develop some system for the public to utilize all these private parking garages in a more seamless way so we can lose more street parking for bigger sidewalks, protected bike/scooter lanes and transit lanes. It would be nice if there was a central way to pay and a way to know what garages had openings. I posted a parking study last year that IIRC, said there was a ton of under utilized parking garages.

There are a few apps out there already attempting to do this, but of course that requires buy-in from privately owned garages, etc, etc.

Look into ParkWhiz for iPhone, among others.

[freerover]

Here are some proposed changes to downtown parking policies. It's more of a carrot than a club to reduce garages. Allowing the converted garages not to count against the FAR is pretty big.

[Geographer]

What would be the effect on downtown development if the city council banned above ground parking?

[H2O]

Originally Posted by Geographer

What would be the effect on downtown development if the city council banned above ground parking?

We would see a lot less development Downtown and / or shorter buildings because it would be difficult to achieve the market expectation for parking in the remaining smaller lots. At least for the short term. Rather than banning, I'd like to see all above ground parking structures be designed to be convertible (flat floor plates, tall floor-to-floor heights, etc. The LDC change would be an incentive to do that.