Sorry if my reply is coming a little too late, but I have to respond to this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolf13
As I mentioned above, going underground is super expensive. To offset that cost, you need more revenue. To get more revenue you need more leasable square feet which means you have to build taller and get more tenants. To build tall there needs to be demand, which Winnipeg doesn't have.
Yes, Winnipeg needs to become more pedestrian friendly and yes, Cities like Toronto, Vancouver, etc ARE more pedestrian friendly, but they also have (or have had, during past growth periods) far more demanding office markets that allow them to build very HIGH... and many of these highrises have underground parkades as their costs are offset by a higher density of rent-paying tenants. In Winnipeg we still need that parking as the residential market downtown hasn't matured yet and we have to park somewhere, so parkades (which are a major improvement over a surface lot) happen sometimes.
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And yet with every new above ground parkade that gets built, you make the area less and less appealing for people to settle into in the first place. That means no market to support underground parkade construction as well, which means more above ground parking structures have to be built, which makes the area less appealing for people..... and on and on this cycle goes. Obviously this whole pattern has to be broken somewhere.
And I have to seriously disagree that a parkade is an improvement over a surface lot, although I used to think that it was. It's an improvement in that it takes the function of several surface lots and fits it all efficiently into one compact space. Freeing former parking area up for development. The trouble is that it does not actually get rid of the aesthetic ugliness that parking lots have. Instead it takes that intrinsic ugliness and compresses it all into a single small location. Sure it's great for everything outside of the block, but for the unfortunate city block that it resides on a parkade is an unsightly abomination for everyone who uses the area. It's one of the most effective structures out there when you wanna ruin the appeal of an urban environment. This is why downtown Vancouver and Toronto have nearly all of their parkades completely underground, because they wanna give people an actual reason to go downtown and use those parkades. If they had all of their parking infrastructure located above ground they would become the ugliest and most unlivable parts of the city that no one would want to drive to in the first place.
Look, you could make the same case for a city with open sewers. "Sure it would be great if we could put our sewer lines underground, but our city isn't big enough to be able to afford covering them up! We just need to wait until more people move into our raw sewage filled city. Then we'll be able to collect enough taxes to start the construction project of covering them over!" Poorly integrated on-street parkades are part of what's CAUSING the downtown's lack of an office and residential market. You may think that I'm putting too much importance into aesthetics of an area, but this stuff seriously matters when you expect people to sit outside a patio in the exchange district right across from a giant smelly parkade tucked in the middle of a canyon-like street, that's supposed to be a marvel of turn of the century european style architecture. It matters because the sheer lack of awareness of how to implement these decisions properly in our city council produces utterly tragic results upon the long term appeal of an area.
This is why a city designed around the automobile wouldn't be half bad if it weren't for the fact that eventually you need to find a place to park all of them. That is the real price of car-centric urban planning, the disaster that parking demands exert on a city's valuable supply of space.
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