Quote:
Originally Posted by VivaLFuego
^If the parking were priced appropriately (i.e. apparently it needed to be higher than zero in that location), the excess demand wouldn't be an issue. Of course, it shouldn't be a stripmall next to a rail rapid transit line to begin with.
Exactly. The city would be so much better and more livable if it were all built like Roosevelt & Canal. I hope they tear down the pumping station or Tribune Building to build a surface lot so you can drive to Michigan Avenue. ![Roll eyes](images/smilies/rolleyes.gif) Come on kids, let's pile into the car and visit the exciting asphalt district!
That Target garage works fine. It's busy, but it's supposed to be busy and saturated at peak times, otherwise it's been inefficiently overbuilt for it's urban location.
You do realize that if all urban residents lived your lifestyle with your preferences, the city would be completely unrecognizable from the city you currently love to live in driving to surface parking lots, right? If everyone drove downtown, you'd have to tear down half the buildings and replace them with parking garages of the same size, to say nothing of the 3 new expressways needed to get them there at peak times.
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I think the garage is fine as well for the Target about 90% of the time. But when it's shopping season, stay away from the entire general vicinity if you're in a car. Clark gets backed up, and so does Roosevelt. Maybe it'll be better this year if some of the overflow people decide to park (and are allowed to) in the Roosevelt Collection. That other 10% of the time, though, is what keeps me away from there. It's just a traffic hassle and there's nothing I would buy there that I can't get elsewhere that's less of a headache for me. But that's just me.
As far as my lifestyle, I live in Bronzeville and work just North of Chicago Ave. I go to the gym at Roosevelt & Canal (which is a much more highly functional garage than Target's, btw) and do most of my day-to-day shopping right around that area because it's on my way home. I have a car and drive largely because I'm at work nearly 10 hours a day every day and need the efficiency of it to be able to get other things done. Could I take the train instead? Of course. But the car saves me an absolute minimum of an hour of my personal time every single day.
I think a lot of the arguments and discussions about planning and design that take place on these boards revolve around what people consider to be the "right" kind of lifestyle for living in a city. I went to and lived at IIT for four years while working part time in the loop and never had a car the whole time. I took the train everywhere. I never needed a car and never much wanted one. But I still also mapped out my personal traffic patterns based on what was most efficient for me. And that's the bottom line about why I drive now. It meets my needs better than not driving. I lived the no-car lifestyle for as long as it worked for me. It doesn't now and so now it's different.
At the end of the day, I think that's the way most everyone will treat that grocery store at LSE. I highly doubt many people living in Aqua are going to take the time to go down to the parking garage, get their car, and drive over to that store, just to go into another parking garage, and do the same going back, when they could just walk and probably take the same amount of time overall, unless of course they're really loading up on a huge amount of groceries and need the vehicle.
Overall, though, high volume destination stores have to have parking. They can't afford not to have it if they want to be able to attract the highest number of customers possible. That being said however, LSE isn't exactly a destination location for drivers. Anyone not living over there is probably pretty hard pressed to figure out how to even get there to begin with. So I'm going to doubt that you're going to see that area flooded with vehicles headed to the new grocery store.