For garages with flat floor plates, yes. Ramped parking is another story, and it unfortunately seems to be the more common type of garage. The other issue is that parking garages are usually built with a short floor-to-floor height (10’-12’, compared to 14-16’ for commercial buildings) which would lead to challenges in maintaining reasonable head clearances when converting the space. We have started working on some projects where parking is built with these limitations in mind, but it’s rare that clients want to spend the extra money.
I know this is a controversial view, but some of the urban designers at my firm have also begun to favor stand-alone parking garages as the more future-proof way of dealing with parking. Yeah, it makes for a shitty urban environment now, but if we can design them nicely and have ground-floor retail, it’s a much more preferable scenario to be able to demo and rebuild than to have a city with useless empty parking podiums.
I feel like I have said this in the past myself (but not as well as you put it here). It is a necessary evil, for now, but if parking is stand-alone, it is a lot easier to demo and replace in the future than dealing with a half parking deck/half office/residential/hotel building.
In terms of floor heights, absolutely. My concern would be the depth of the floor plates. A minimum parking garage footprint is 125’ x 300’ according to design guidelines… not sure what the actual average in Raleigh is.
I don’t work in residential (so someone can correct me if I’m wrong), but the preferred floor plate is, what… 60’ wide for a double-loaded layout (unit + corridor + unit)? Seems like it would be a challenge to utilize the whole floor plate while still getting light into the center. Maybe we’ll figure out some kind of use for a large enclosed interior space surrounded by a ring of residential units. Or maybe that’s where the autonomous cars will idle
Not sure if this is the right place but I have a parking garage question and several people on here seem knowledgeable. In several parking garages downtown you can listen to satellite radio and talk on your phone all the up the garage while in others the signal is lost immediately. Do they use satellite boosters in the ones where the signal works?
She’s not in a leadership position, she’s just a squeaky wheel who gets a lot of attention by virtue of being a squeaky wheel. She never offers pro-active solutions to her complaints, she just complains.
The Sirius/XM signal is predominately a satellite signal which has virtually zero ability to propagate through obstacles. You might be able to get a signal in a house with a wood/tar roof, but probably not a tin roof for instance. In a downtown setting, you’re not going to get a sat-based signal in a commercial multi-story building. To compensate for that there are some terrestrial antenna but I’m not sure what frequency they run on. Either way, depending where they are, what frequency they run at (more or less propagation) and if they’re omni vs direction and where they sit, that’s likely why you will sometimes hold on to a signal or lose it.
The reason I ask is that the Quorum Center parking deck has satellite radio and phone service throughout the parking deck. While we were out for the fire we lived in multiple downtown apartments and none had satellite radio in the parking structure. Now we’re back in the Quorum and the satellite radio works on all of the parking garage floors except for one. I was curious if there’s anything we can do to get that one floor back. We should probably just be grateful that it works on the rest of the floors.
Actually, while Mary Ann and I agree on a lot of practical issues, and on the whole I think she’ll end up doing a perfectly fine job as a mayor, there was a lot in her vision that made me think about how much I’m going to miss Nancy McFarlane, from the stadiums to the gondolas to the inability to resist making the question “What will Raleigh look like in 2040?” about herself. (“Our mayor twenty years ago, known as Notorious, started this thing.”)
Speaking of which, does anybody know what this is in reference to? “We teamed with Lyft on a first-in-the-nation transit experiment … We partnered with Lyft to pilot a bus service that focused on moving people in a whole different way, from hub to hub. It’s automated, with dedicated lanes across the city; most trips take fewer than fifteen minutes.”
I don’t think Octavia Rainey was being entirely literal when she predicted no black people in Raleigh by 2040. Perhaps instead she was using an extreme example to cast light on what, in her mind, is an extreme situation? Have you driven through College Park, Idlewild, or South Park recently? OMG! Unless I’m mistaken she remains the chairperson of the N. Central CAC. Does this not meet the definition of a leadership position?
Not really. The CACs for the most part are just composed of people who bitch about everything and support little to nothing. She’s one of the primary reasons the city considered getting rid of CACs about 5 years ago. Octavio is loud and calls anyone who disagrees with her a racist, including public officials or anyone who shows up at the CAC meeting… if you are white and you challenge he her…just wait for the theatrics.
