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Originally Posted by WolselyMan
I can assure you it is no accident that I'm generalizing this to all parking. I actually consider parking to be single handedly the most destructive effect that the automobile has had on our society. Not the gridlock, or even the environmental pollution. On average, around 40-50% of the land in the average North American cities is now devoted solely for parking, and it has had the effect of completely and utterly decimating the landscape of our cities. We aren't designing cities for the human creature anymore. Instead we've completely redesigned it for the car; as if they're the inhabitants of the place. The landscape is now only ever bearable if you happen to be inside a car. If you're a pedestrian, you'll quickly notice just how unlivable we've made the places that humans are supposed to call their home. This reorganization of the urban environment has hurt some cities much more than others, but Winnipeg would be the perfect poster child for the detrimental effects of automobile-oriented city planning. Practically every single decision the city made that had to do with making Winnipeg more car friendly back in the 50s did nothing but destroy something that added to our potential. We tore down boulevards lined with full grown trees on our major arterial roads to make way for street widening. We went on a demolition frenzy knocking down an entire exchange districts worth of historic buildings south of portage to create new parking space. Seriously. Some of the decisions that our city planners made back then were truly unforgivable.
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The city is designed for the citizen. Canada is a new country and was designed with unprecedented space in mind. I'm sure this blew earlier citizens away, the sheer luxury of space. And turns out, people wanted cars.
It could still have been done much better. We can move on from our frustration with that matter.
I'm a car guy but I too wish for a more European urban experience. However many of those have historical charm that outweighs inefficiencies, so we forgive them. How they've adapted over centuries is impressive. THAT'S what Winnipeg needs to improve at. However we're at a place where we need an economic injection and turns out some of this demands parkades. A necessary evil but we're not exactly taking opportunity away with so many surface lots remaining. There is a happy medium between urban utopia and automobile access.
Winnipeg's problem is it was poorly planned, and problems downtown were ignored for 25 years before anyone did anything, where most cities try to react faster, or even act proactively.
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Originally Posted by WolselyMan
You still fail to realize that what drives people away from surface lots is the exact same fundamental mechanism that drives them away from parkades as well. People don't like surface lots because they create dead zones devoid of reasons for people to be around, interfere with the continuity of business, waste valuable land that could be home to dozens of amenities & functions at the same time, and are just plain ugly and often grimy additions to the area. Every parkade that we build is occupying street front space that could of been a spot for retail, or another office building, or anything that could actually be considered a destination . Parkades are nothing but backstage space that services those destinations. This is nothing to get worked up about. All buildings need to have loading zones, parking garage entrances and waste disposal sites. The problem is that a HUGE amount of the land downtown is disproportionately devoted to taking on the roles of back lanes, to the point of serious extremity where the N-S streets downtown are almost COMPLETELY DEVOID of retail, business, and residencies. Because of this, destinations are spread ridiculously thin across the entire area. Too thin to create any kind of critical mass that'll attract people to use those amenities in the first place. You may reply that parkades will help reduce the number of dead zones needed because they can squeeze 5 parking lots down into one, but that's the thing; Our blocks are ALREADY overfilled with parking garages despite the insane amount of surface lots we have. I don't wanna see a single new above ground parkade built downtown again, because as far as I'm concerned, building none is too many at this point.
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Again, we all hate surface lots, and parkades aren't disneyland. I never said they were. No shit they're dead zones! It's currently expensive to build underground in a market that doesn't pay you back for your efforts. I completely get what you think I'm not getting.
And why would I argue that they take away a dead zone? It's better than a surface lot but still lipstick on a pig.
If the market for more retail was there, it would already be there instead of a parkade. If the market for more office was there, it would already be there instead of a parkade.
Why? Highest and best use. Every developer that isn't a moron usually pursues this, and it would always include commercial and retail activity when possible.
No kidding they serve a "destination". We're still at the point where we need to convince people to VISIT downtown, or to WORK downtown instead of the suburbs. Commercial activity begets residential activity. When properties downtown thrive, retailers and companies take notice. If nothing ever goes ahead because cost overruns are too high, then nothing gets built.
You have a point that it thins out our pedestrian activity... but ion this case we're talking about a 45 storey highrise. I'm conerned too if a 4 storey box requires a parkade. If you're concerned that we run out of surface lots for development, that means our market is probably strong enough to demo some parkades and build UP.
Your frustrations are with the cost of construction, and the perhaps unreasonable demands of parking from businesses. I, like you, want street level retail and a lively pedestrian experience, but a parkade is not at fault, the market is.
Quote:
Originally Posted by WolselyMan
(According to the downtown biz website, "approximately 41% of land downtown is allocated to parking, and over 20% of that are surface parking lots."http://downtownwinnipegbiz.com/topic/involvement/ That's right, parkades actually outnumber surface lots downtown by 4-to-1! Now, I have no idea where they got this figure from, and I'm skeptical that it really is that high, or even how they measure land. But it should raise some eyebrows about whether surface lots really are the only problem here).
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The problem is the market. Surface lots and parkades are a byproduct of this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by WolselyMan
People build parkades in downtown Winnipeg because they've bought into the belief that the best way to revitalize the area is to make parking spaces just as abundant as they are in suburban big box store sprawl zones. They believe this so pervasively that our downtown now has some of the most abundant and cheapest downtown parking of any N. American city our size and upwards. These people are fighting a lost battle, like trying to squeeze a bunch of fat guys into a tiny car. Built up urban areas are intrinsically more inconvenient for automobiles, which is the whole reason why we don't build cities like that anymore. Downtown will never be able to compete with suburban retail parking no matter how many parkades you build. Underground or above ground for that matter.
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People build parkades because the tenants in a prospective development asked for or demanded it. It's not a huge revenue driver. There was a time when perhaps developers thought it was a golden ticket, and yes, we have to shake that feeling loose. Now we build parkades because underground is too expensive.
Quote:
Originally Posted by WolselyMan
But there's a far simpler solution to all of these problems than hiding all of your parking spaces underground. In fact, it gets rid of the need for parking entirely. It's called PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION. Nobody would have to continually demolish heritage status buildings in the exchange if you had a convenient high frequency bus network that has stations fully integrated into the streetscape and normalized as the standard form of transport to get to and around downtown. The hydro building operates on this philosophy. It has no parking facilities built into it whatsoever and instead relies on encouraging it's employees to commute using the bus, which purposefully has a stop right in front of the building. I like to imagine a day where taking a bus to the forks is as straightforwards as driving there and finding a parking spot combined. You'll never be able to replace cars with this, but could you replace enough so that an underground parkade won't have to be as big and expensive?
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Just lose the vice grip on ideology a little. Sure, public transport. Who missed the opportunity to build a subway network? Shit on his grave. You're railing on the byproducts and not the causes.
Hydro can afford to do that because they overpay people and employ everyone, give them every second monday off, and are the government. But I agree, I like their approach... but not every private corp is like google and give everyone nap rooms and bicycles. We're in Winnipeg... here you have to give them EVERYTHING to convince corporations to set up shop here. In Manhattan, you don't have to give them shit. You're giving them Manhattan. Plus corporations also include heavy hitting millionaires... they want to drive. That's fair.
As far as condos or apartments with no or limited parking? We need critical mass first. I mentioned, maybe in this thread or another, that a highrise project in downtown Cgy is BRAGGING about not offering parking, and people are actually buying it! It's a sweet way for a developer to save money, pretend to be green, not use up too much land and give people what they want.
If this were possible in Winnipeg we'd be doing it. It's not that we're obsessed with parking, it's that our downtown isn't THERE yet. It can get there, and I'd applaud a parking free project, if underground is still unaffordable.
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Originally Posted by WolselyMan
How is cramming our blocks up with deadweight street front parking garages instead of commerical, retail, and residential going to make the area more viable for commercial, retail and residential? How is spreading out amenities butter thin across the area not anything but the antithesis of a collective massing of commercial, retail, and residential?
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How do you not get this yet? Everyone wants to make more money and not less. If the market for more retail andf office was there, they would build it.
In this case a parkade is being used to help make a 45 storey tower viable. My only hesitation is the developer in question, though I understand the principle.
If you make it hard for people to make money, then corporations, retailers, and finally, residents, won't come here. Simple.
In regards to parkades spreading our amenities thin, that's a planning question.
Quote:
Originally Posted by WolselyMan
How are ever going to advance to those stages if we've already built those parkades? Are you suggesting that we're simply going to demolish all of them once we no longer need them? How long will the st. regis parkade be needed? How long will it be there until it's finally torn down and something else is rebuilt? I disagree with you that a parkade is preferable over a surface lot in place of st. regis. Surface lots at the very least have the advantage that they can be ridden of at anytime and can be replaced with any new development you have the vision and resources to create. Parkades are something that took effort and money to build. No ones gonna spend all that money building a structure like that if it's not implied that it's going to be some sort of permanent feature of the landscape. Surface lots are empty unused space that can be temporarily exploited for parking. Parkades on the other hand are as indisposable as any other shiny office building. And you accuse me of being too utopian?
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Again, in this case, it's serving a 45 story tower. That's an influx of density, and considering that the "density" or "activity" provided by the St. Regis is ultimately undesireable, it's a positive. If it was an 8 story tower I'd be annoyed.
And YES we'd demo some parkades! Why wouldn't we? It's a damn parkade! Maybe newer ones like the GrainX or SkyCity stay, but others? Gone, who cares?
Furthermore, if someone had operated the St. Regis properly in the last 30 years I'd feel differently.
Shiny office buildings aren't "indisposible" because we have like 4 shiny ones. And yes you're being utopian, because it's easier to demo a parkade in a healthy market than to overspend, or thus never build, an ambitious project that includes a parkade in a struggling one.
Quote:
Originally Posted by WolselyMan
You are correct that office workers are the ones who will care the least about the aesthetics of the downtown area. Because they're the downtown visitors that interact the least with an area. All they do is get up in their home in whyte ridge, drive downtown into a parking lot, complain for a little bit that downtown parking is so much tedious than at their precious IKEA store, maybe tripping over a passed out bum on their way to the building, stay inside the office all day and drive back. In fact office workers are the only reason why downtown Winnipeg hasn't been already utterly abandoned years ago, and those offices are only established there as a vestige from back when downtown was the place to be. It's so much more convenient now to develop new office space in suburban business parks, where employees don't have to worry about limited parking and where there aren't any drunks around (at least not for now.) If lack of parking was what's holding downtown's office market back then we would still have the best market out of any other Canadian city.
I think I'm done
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For goodness sake.
1) It's not lack of parking downtown. Despite this board's tendency to look at development collectively, downtown is a collection of individual developments. If individual developments do not perform on paper, then they don't get built. Unfortunately, sometimes that means including a parkade.
I too am frustrated by this because we ABSOLUTELY have enough parking downtown. But when you're developing a condo in a new market that struggles, you cannot point to parking elsewhere and tell prospective tenants that they'll have to walk a block or two with their groceries.
2) I'm just as annoyed with all the whyte ridgers and their minivans, and that bad planning peddling to them. I would have loved to live downtown but it wasn't where it needed to be when I was that age. I would have loved to have a 2BR condo and yes, parking for 2 cars because I'm a car guy, but I'd be downtown. Our downtown is probably 5 years from where it would have needed to be to convince me... but I already have kids and a house in ESP now (and it's pretty nice out there). Ran out of room in Fraser's grove.
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