Quote:
Originally Posted by mhays
Seattle has seen some benefits but also some negatives, some counterintuitive. This pains me as a militant pedestrian with no car, but it turns out parking lots can be important to business districts. They often bring in far more customers than the buildings that replace them. Brooklyn retail streets can do well purely based on walking and transit, but tweener districts seem to need both.
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That's true, car storage is unfortunately still a necessary evil for most most "tweener urban" (10K - 30K ppsm supporting residential density) neighborhood commercial nodes/corridors.
But the form of said parking stil matters too.
In the commercial district in my neighborhood (~20K ppsm supporting residential density), construction recently started on a 63 unit midrise that replaced a surface parking lot that was HEAVILY used by customers going to the adjoining neighborhood shopping district around the corner from it.
The business owners
SCREAMED AND HOWLED about how the loss of the parking lot would kill their businesses.
The compromise that was able to get approved: add a public parking garage on the second floor of the new development to replace the lost public parking.
Certainly not a perfect solution, but still light years better than that stupid fucking old surface parking lot that was there.