Goyeau Parking Garage Sale and parking strategy
On council agenda there’s an item about an offer to purchase the Goyeau Parking Garage. Suprisingly little information is known about this
Now I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, only that the following information is not known.
Who wants to purchase it?
For how much?
WHat their intentions are?
By intentions I would ask how many daily parking spots would be taken out of daily circulation?
There are many downtown businesses that depend on that garage. I know it is the main parking garage for myself and my customers.
The rumours are that the purchaser could be anyone from the developer of the TD Bank bldg to the Casino who also purchased the former Mady Parking garage.
Last year when administration recommended a rate increase to garages and meters downtown only, and a freeze to the rest of the city. I spent considerable time coming up with a proposal that would see parking garage and surface parking spaces prices frozen city wide while meter prices raised city wide. (The status quo simply wasn’t an option).
I felt it made sense to see a bigger gap in the price of On street vs. Off street parking instead of making the parking price differential between penalizing Downtown over the rest of hte city. I would be frustrated to see all that effort be nullified with the loss of low cost off street parking in downtown.
I just hope councillors and administration don’t continue to look at Parking within our city as simply Balance sheet and Income statement in isolatioun and starts looking at it as a tool to create downtown development and revitalization.
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If they did get ride of that garage it would create problems as loads of people use it to go downtown for lunch and dinner. If parking becomes a nightmare then people won’t go downtown.
There is already a perception that there is no parking downtown, to which there is a ton of parking available. But the perception is there.
Mark, I think you are correct that the city DOES look at it as a balance and income sheet. I would think that parking downtown should be free on Saturdays to lure people downtown (but heaven forbid we upset the owners of Devonshire Mall) and that there should be a free 10 minute period for parking on the streets 6 days out of the week!
The more barriers the city puts up in downtown the more people will not go. Parking is one of the biggest barriers downtown. The other is that the little retail that is downtown is spread all over the place. This, is where I think districting could be a big part in making that transition. I also believe that downtown merchants (all business owners) better start working together instead of only looking at themselves in the proverbial mirror. (Hey Box Office Bar, I am talking to you here just like I am talking to Katzmann).
From Transit Windsor’s long term plan.
http://www.citywindsor.ca/DisplayAttach.asp?AttachID=4973
Parking Supply and Pricing: Controls on downtown parking supply combined with parking price increases would increase the attractiveness of transit.
In recent years, low downtown parking prices, increased downtown parking supply, and abundant, free parking outside of the downtown
have encouraged greater auto use. Several mechanisms are available for controlling parking supply and pricing. The following are recommended:
• Parking Standards – lower the minimum parking standards for various land
uses in areas served by transit. For example, if a new apartment building is to be built on a transit route, allow the developer to offer fewer parking spaces for tenants.
• Parking Charges – increase user charges for City-owned parking spaces in the downtown. At the same time, short-term parking rates should be decreased relative to the long-term all-day rates so that parking spaces are available and attractively priced for retail/service trips. Parking charges can have a direct impact on the use of public transit particularly with respect to parking in downtown areas. Parking charges should, as a minimum, equate to the cost of a round-trip adult cash fare for short-term (less than two hours) parking, and twice the round-trip adult cash fare for all day parking.
• Parking Levy – charge an annual levy or tax on all non-City owned parking
spaces in the downtown area. The revenues generated from the charges and levies should be earmarked to transit.
These are very good recomendations. But, TW has also been recomending no more sprawl !! Unfortunately the City still looks at TW as the ugly stepchild when in fact the more we improve transit the better success this city will have in riding out the miserable economy.
Owning a car and not living anywhere near a tansit route isn’t donig me any favours lately.
James,
I love transit, but I’d like to support it with a carrot and not a stick
Since parking meter rates have risen twice since I’ve been a member of the DWBIA (4 yrs),
Once from 75c/hr to $1.00/hr and a second time to $1.25/hr. I think we’ve done our fair share. (almost 67% in 4 yrs)
Also, Those recommendations do not take into account the required differential between on street and off street parking.
Its one thing to raise on street convenient parking. But we’re talking about the potiential of complete elimination of off street parking at any rate, or raising to an amount that:
WE SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASE TRAFFIC BECAUSE PEOPLE CIRCLE THE STREETS LOOKING FOR ON STREET PARKING because Off street is unavailable or too expensive.
(CAPS to substitute for the bold I’m looking for)
A wise man once proclaimed…
“Free Parking - The fertility drug for cars”
Hear that, UrbanRat? I just called you a Wise Man!
Parking is just a stop-gap measure until we raise the residents-per-hectare in the downtown. Unfortunately, a lot of the great real estate is devoted to automobile storage - and those SUVs take up a lot of space. They call that a positive feedback loop. More parking -> less people -> more people demanding more parking to lure the suburbanites -> a lot less people -> you get the picture.
We should be devoting more space in our downtown to people and not cars. That is the ideal. Our job is to figure out how to get to the point where that is feasible.
I would personally prefer to see free parking in the garages, and limit “on the street” parking to 15min, or even get rid of parking on Ouellette Avenue (between Riverside and Wyandotte). I’m sure I will get a lot of negative feedback on this, but I think it would encourage more people to come downtown and use the garages (granted they would also have to clean up the parking garages, as they are not the cleanest). With no parking on Ouellette Avenue, you could extend the sidewalks or even use the added space for other uses (I’m sure Mark could come up with a few good uses/ideas for the added space!)
TW is truly our of touch with reality! Do they really expect that people who have cars are going to look at parking rates and then decide. “Parking is too expensive, lets take the bus”! What about those with children? It would cost more money (and time, which is money) to have a family of four ride the bus to downtown from the borders of our city than to drive and find parking.
This is just another reason why TW is what it is today. Hopelessly naive and wishing for people to ride their buses. The same buses that have very poor brakes, too loud, noxious fumes spilling out of the tail pipe and oil leaks that are starting to drain into the sewers (check out Chatham St. if you don’t believe me and look at the concrete in front of the “funky” new bus terminal). In about 3 years Chatham will have to be repaved because that oil is going to destroy the asphalt.
Yup good ‘ol Transit Windsor…a hope and prayer away from glory!
Mark M that is the problem. People will not go to a store to buy if they feel they have to walk a couple of blocks (regardless of the couple of blocks they walk to park and get to teh store at the malls). The main streets MUST have parking or people just will not go there. That has been proven time and again over the last 50 years. That is why the perception of no parking downtown is false.
We sort of have a two tier downtown parking as most Ouellette or “mainstreet spots are either 10-15 minutes or 1 hr, with 2 hrs on the side streets.
Garages have the first hour free, to go beyond that is unacceptable as the deficit in the parking fund is too great and free off street parking would have to be taxpayer subsidized and I don’t believe taxpayers would ever support that.
Remember, just free parking for one month downtown cost $50,000. Downtown businesses could never afford that
ME, the problem you describe in your last post is not a parking problem but a perception problem. People think that Mall surface parking is more convenient than a garage, but in reality the walk from the back of a mall spot is longer than walking from a parking garage (I’d betcha cash on that)
Problem is that people go downtown expecting a street spot and thats why you need substantial difference in on street vs. off street so the ones that get the garage don’t feel that they lost something.
Mark… when you say “free parking for one month downtown costs $50,000″ do you mean free “on-street” parking, free “garage” parking, or both? Just curious. You would obviously know best, but I don’t understand how a parking garage which is owned by the City of Windsor could cost that much to operate? That’s just insane.
I will also admit that I go to Chanoso’s a few times a week, and I always park at the Goyeau Parking Garage.
A few years back the DWBIA made an ill advised good faith effort to provide free parking for one month. The city charged us for lost revenue of $50,000. Unfortunately, employees of downtown businesses and gov’t offices used the parking which had the opposite effect of what was desired.
I made a council speach 4 years ago criticising the cities Parking task force because they brought council choices of “raising rates or status quo”. Instead of looking at the issue from a business recruitment, tourism or development point of view.
My criticism was that the task force was never given and never examined information from any expert sources such as
http://www.parking.org/Resources/Default.aspx
You would be blown away at how much parking has been analyzed worldwide.
I didn’t put that bit from the TW plan because I entirely agree with it. I put it up there to point out that from department to department within the city there are conflicting strategies it seems.
Parking is a funny thing. People will walk half a mile in December from the furthest reaches of Devonshire Mall’s parking lot but, they won’t park a block from their destination downtown.
I have never had a problem finding parking downtown. Red Bull no problem. Fireworks, no problem. Tonight, no problem. Went to the AIDS walk at Charles Clark Square and parked on Goyeau by the Tim’s.
Like most of Downtown’s problems it seems to be more perception than actual problems.
In a long ago blog here, I commented on Parking in an urban environment and with this recent posting nothing has changed.
Parking, free or otherwise is terrible use and waste of land in a city, an evil necessity of our 20th century thinking. Robert White in his book, The City, discovered through research that EVERY vehicle in a city needs the minimum of six vacant parking spaces to be available at any one time during the day to have freedom of movement (start counting every space, work out the square footage for each space and add, then apply an averaged commercial cost or rate per square foot to that space to find its true value to a city!) With service costs of maintaining that free infrastructure rising, can we continue to heavily subsidize that infrastructure and give up all that valuable real estate? No! Just so someone doesn’t have to waddle more than twenty steps to their destination.
The predominant cause of rising obesity in our society is that we expect to drive everywhere, park for free and then walk only a few steps to our destination.
When a parking lot or garage sits empty its commercial value is nil and downtown Windsor has a lot of empty lots after daily commerce and on the weekends, all you have to is wander the core on a Saturday or Sunday and even after five on a work day. Even during the day many of the lots aren’t full. There they sit soaking up the heat of the day and heating the air at night to create a hotter environment than necessary, every parking space surface does that, contributing to an over heated city.
British Columbia now has a Parking Space legislation and taxing instrument on all commercial parking in the province, the more land and spaces devoted to parking, the more you pay in taxes to have those spaces. I would like to see that legislation in Ontario.
We should immediately stop the subsidization of free convenience parking and start charging the commercial per square foot rate charges of a parking space, reflecting its true market value because, a dollar an hour doesn’t pay for the maintenance and infrastructure needed to maintain that parking space. You want to park your vehicle on steroids you pay. In Toronto, scooters now get free parking!
Imagine how much Devonshire mall or any mall strip or otherwise in Windsor and the county would have to pay in extra taxes for all their “free” parking areas, if they were taxed at the rate they charge stores in their malls per square foot for all that parking, not to say of the cost to the environment in generating huge heat sumps contributing to urban degradation.
Free parking, is not free parking, it costs someone else, somewhere a dollar to build and maintain. Space in any city today is costing more, free to park should be taken out of the equation unless it charges the going current commercial rate per square foot.
A free city parking space, or a dollar a hour rate, is still a huge subsidy to a car owner, more than the subsidy to our museums, art galleries, parks and libraries combined. The free ride or free lunch as Councilor Gignac proclaimed for the arts, should be over for parking in this city or any city.
And as James said above and I saw first hand many a times since Devonshire mall was built, people will walk, trudge a half a kilometer or now more in a snow storm through from their free parking space to get inside the mall but won’t walk twenty steps in any of our commercial neighbourhoods to use a store on the street. Obesity and stupidity live on!
By charging a commercial rate to use a parking space anywhere, except at home for one space (extra land parking spaces two or more will be charged a lesser land rate but charged are all the same) the rate charged parking in that space should be higher than a Transit Windsor ridership fee.
The taxes collected per parking space could be used to build a light rail system in the city. It is time to make those who drive aware of the true cost of providing all parking for their convenience. You want convenience, you pay! Isn’t that the normal business practice of commerce? If someone wants something bad enough they will pay! Just look at parking and car storage in New York!
The average norm of living in North America today is that every home has two vehicles (those two vehicles need six parking spaces each per day). What isn’t said or noted is that each household needs access to a third vehicle (a hidden resource) in case one breakdowns or needs service or the whole daily routine of that household gets upset because schedules for work or recreation are disturbed and the one that is left is driving all over the place at all hours. Also as the kids in the suburbs need to get to their jobs, the necessity of a third vehicle (which generates a need for a hidden fourth vehicle) enters the picture because the other two are needed for the parents to get to work and the kids schedule interferes with that schedule. So over time suburbia becomes a used car parking lot not at least to speak of the congestion on the roads. There is nothing beautiful about suburbia with all those cars park everywhere! What you pay in cheaper property taxes is eaten up by vehicle procurement, insurance, maintenance and increasing need for infrastructure. Now imagine a parking tax for those extra vehicles!
Having now lived twenty years without owning a car (after about ten years of withdrawl,) I can get about this city rather decently by foot, by bus and by taxi and sometimes the goodness of friends with a car. Land used for parking is becoming a cancerous tumor of any city in the world and the status quo can’t be maintained or allowed to grow.
I’m not anti-car, we will never get rid of the need for them but the huge outward cost of building and maintaining to structure our cities around the use of the car is draining our pocket books and increasing our taxes at an ever growing, not a diminishing rate, not to say of the land needed just to park one car at anytime, anywhere!
I just went out and measured the on street car parking space in front of my building, taking the hint from Urbanrat above. The space measures 2 metres wide by 6 metres long or 12m2 or roughly 130 square feet! If each vehicle needs six parking spaces to be vacant at any one time then it is 7 (1[home] + 6 x 130 = 910 square feet of land per day to freely move around this city.
Statistics Canada in the profile for Windsor in the Transportation module
http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census06/data/profiles/community/Details/Page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo1=CSD&Code1=3537039&Geo2=PR&Code2=35&Data=Count&SearchText=Windsor&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=35&B1=All&Custom=
Mode of transportation to work Windsor, City Ontario
Total Male Female Total Male Female
Total employed labour force 15 years and over with a usual place of work
Car, truck, van, as driver 70,780 38,725 32,055
70,780 vehicles x 7 spaces = 495,460 parking spaces, or 5,945,520 square metres, it is a large number but considering that all spaces at one time of the day will be used by more than say ten vehicles per day the number isn’t that large 594,552 square metres or 0.000594 km2 but it is still a large number in land use. Windsor land foot print is 146.91 square kilometres. A rough average is 27 % of land use in Windsor goes to parking.
Does anyone know the going average commercial per square fort rate for property in Windsor (ya..I know…Low!) ?
Even longer ago I read an Op-ed article, where one researcher in the U.S. looked at taxi use in a city verses owning a car and commuting to work. They found that within a ten mile diameter from your home, it was cheaper to contract a taxi company to pick you up every day at home and take you to work and bring you home after work, than owning and operating a car for the same trip(s). Its assured business for taxis and the fix rate (negotiated) is usually lower than the metre rate for a single trip.
Mark stated originally:
On council agenda there’s an item about an offer to purchase the Goyeau Parking Garage. Suprisingly little information is known about this
Now I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, only that the following information is not known.
Who wants to purchase it?
For how much?
WHat their intentions are?”
Lets assume that it is for purchase and purchaser still wants to operate it as a parking garage, can they raise the rates to cover investment costs there by turning off customers or keep the rates the same or lower them to compete with other city own lots in the core. A real bind for the investor! Sounds like the reason d’etre for the tunnel deal.Thats if they want the parking structure for the land for another use by demolishing it, there by reducing parking in the downtown. Condo? Commercial retail/office?
By its nature, a parking garage with many floors has a smaller foot print than a surface parking lot, although more expensive to build initially serves a more intense urban environment.
Why is the city thinking of selling it? Another question, the sceptic in me, is that the city could be testing the waters to see how much of our infrastructure they can sell, water/sanitation systems (WUC), Enwin et al. By little sales are they preparing us for bigger sell off of our infrastructure to private control.
Urbanrat, I like the idea of taxing parking lots at a higher rate. When a home owner puts in a driveway his/her taxes go up. So I wonder what the tax rate for surface lots are and I wonder if the city could raise rates on the surrounding lots that malls put in?
I am sure developers would be up in arms but I believe this is the price of doing business and should be the price in all cities.
I’m not a wise man Chris, just an observing citizen trying to find meaning and purpose in his built environment and questioning of the present day insanity of our city planners, mayor, council and developers that are still, in the early 21st century, fixated on the car! If I had my druthers, I would ban the car from the core all together or make it like London, England and other European cities and make it damn expensive to bring a car downtown and build a walkable, sustainable neighbourhood. Oh, delivery vehicles to downtown would come after midnight and before dawn! But then I would have light rail transit in place.
I think I will go and interview a taxi company and drivers and get their view of our city and talk to them about contracts for service. Wondering if what Mark Bradley said of taxi use can be true.
Or if there is a taxi driver reading this blog, can they give us their view on using a taxi service on contract for daily commuting.
Is it cheaper to use a taxi than to own a car, either for individual trips on the metre and or by contract.
One observation of mind, is that it seems in the general population that there is a stigma to using a taxi, that you haven’t economically made it if you use a taxi. But how much do you pay annually for the use of your car, not including the monthly car payment and insurance, as to contracting with a taxi company.
One thing that is interesting about using taxis and having to pay in cash at the end, is that you get a true value of what that trip really cost you, and if you don’t need a car or own a car for every day use, then the value of using a taxi for those one time trips is, as it appears a greater value for the money.
I mean that I don’t worry about insurance, in the winter the cab is already heated, or having enough gas to get somewhere, blood pressure drops off because I have no road rage, I don’t worry about parking anywhere!
Yes taxis need parking but not as much as an individually owned car, as taxi stands are strategically place around the city.
Sorry for the diversion but the pot of coffee is kicking in!
One contradiction that I wanted to speak to was the issue of parking in a blog like scaledown. It is our mission to advocate for walkability.
However scaledown also advocates for local independant businesses. Parking is a major issue for these businesses as national chains are located in shopping malls and big box centers which do not have to deal with the issue.
Also until we reverse the declining population in the core, local independant businesses rely on parking more and more as they try to create destinations worthy of attracting suburbanites
So does parking issues not a part of walkability sure, but it is a part of supporting local independant businesses which still rely on cars
HEy you can call parking garages an auto subsidy all you want, but perspective dictates they are nothing compared to the taxpayer subsidized cheap land that was given to malls and big box centers
How much taxpayer money was put into the commercial plaza’s infrastructure and land off of central avenue. That free parking comes at a far higher cost than any downtown parking garage.
Its an issue of sustaining our local independant businesses
I don’t think theres any conspiracy going on for the goyeau garage, its just an oportunity to lower the parking fund deficit. However, nowhere in the report is the consequences to local independant businesses mentioned. Or does it list a consequence to tourism, the chrysler theater, the capital, the Art Gallery or other facilities.
It just always seems to be an oversight.
I would guess if it’s the TD developer wanting to purchase the garage for developing the TD building that parking will be part of the development. Then again I assume….and you know what happens when you assume. As I posted in the other area I don’t think there should be any parking on Ouellette and the road should be closed north south, continueing to let the roads go through east west. Close those areas and make them pedestrian only. Then you’d actually go downtown because there’d be space to wander, have a tea and do some window shopping, have some street vendors, and let the stores/restaurants expand outdoor areas.
I like the idea of shutting down ouellette in the early evenings and possibly sunday day like they do in other cities.
Problem with full time pedestrian malls is that since 1970 over 70% of them have failed and have been reopened to traffic.
Also Don your not considering that if Goyeau is already often closed and if it permanently closes for the tunnel plaza you have no North/south access to riverside drive for 5 blocks (McDougall,Goyeau, Ouellette, Pelissier ends at chatham, Victoria one way with a jog to ferry)
Pelissier has more potential for a pedestrian mall, but just closing a street does not make a successful public space, there has to be programming of it