That’s what also makes me laugh, when people complain about paying for parking. There is so so much available free parking… you just gotta walk a few extra feet 
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Not to use your image to go off topic – but if you look at the parking deck, this is what infuriates me about these large decks. There’s so few cars actually parked there. Granted, it’s the top level, but it’s clear that level isn’t needed. It’s clear that the deck should be smaller. It’s clear that decks this size are blights to urban fabric.
Just playing devil’s advocate, isn’t it possible that many car owners are out driving them in the middle of the day, and will need to spaces when they return home at night? 
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Sure…I can be mindful that this image is static, and doesn’t show the fluidity of daily movement. I’d be intrigued to see this photo at 9:00p and also at 7:00a.
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And this time of year, I certainly prefer to park protected from both the sun and any wayward summer hail storms. Still, I think we’d all agree that parking is overbuilt pretty much all the time these days.
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The optimistic hope here is that whatever goes on this lot that is currently in demo/pre-sale status will be taller and thus hide the deck from view. Now, the realistic possibility is that whatever goes in this lot will also have a gigantic, obnoxious parking deck that will be even more prominent
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I agree with you but I see an opportunity here. I’d like to see cities rethink (I believe some are already doing this) the idea that one person gets one space perpetually. The spaces need to be filled and made more easily available to all different kinds of uses. This means more complex parking space management systems. The future for this might prevent building even more parking decks if the existing ones can be made much more efficient.
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I’m all for utilizing empty or underutilized decks for non-car related activities to make up for holes in our public recreation spaces. I started roller skating again last year, and there aren’t many outdoor skate facilities in the area that aren’t skate parks. Empty decks/floors have been my savior when I’m not being kicked out of them (looking at you, Red Hat).
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This is gonna get me some flack here, but I am of the belief that if you want a space for parking, that space comes a premium, and should be reflected in an increase in rent or a set payment. It sucks, but IMO, it’s one of the only ways we can actually see the value of parking spaces that are per individual.
I know it will make some things cost prohibitive, but wouldn’t that be on the developer to decide if parking is that important to the project.
I feel guilty just typing this! But ever since I have moved to NYC, I see less and less value in individual ownership and space for a car. A car is super important still, but it just doesn’t register with me as something we all need now.
This all assumes a massive change in car-culture that has long been needed.
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I agree with you, but it’s a bit unfair to compare NYC to Raleigh. If we had the same density, the public transit here would be way better. I am a strong believer that people will also not use public transit until parking becomes expensive and/or scarce and wouldn’t mind if gas prices and parking go up (moderately).
What part of NYC are you in? How long have you lived there?
I’ve been in NYC for 8 years now - 7 in the East Village of Manhattan and 1 now in Astoria, Queens.
Parking is just as hot button here as it is back in Raleigh, which I find incredibly interesting.
I think we are seeing a shift (COVID actually helped in this regard) from car dependence or at least designing cities away from the car. There’s a greater push for public space, and to leverage car use with a congestion pricing plan.
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Nice. I really love Queens, but have mainly stayed in Elmhurst and Forest Hills.
I may be getting a little off topic here, but I have been interested in what it is like to live in a city like NYC. How far do you typically travel in a day? How far is it to get groceries? How far do you typically go to restaurants/bars?
The problem I find here in Raleigh is that we need to travel further to get to certain places which is not the case in NYC. For example, the nearest grocery store I have here is 1.8 miles away. I’m also about 1.8-2 miles from North Hills. In a city like NYC, I don’t believe (but I’m not sure) if it would be necessary to go that far on an everyday basis. For vacationing/entertainment, there are a lot of options in NYC compared to here (especially without a car). NYC has way more museums and has a lot more attractions that can be accessed via the subway and bus. There are also more options for sporting events, theatrical shows, parks, the beach, and other bigger cities that can be accessed by public transit. Travelling 20 miles in NYC is way different than travelling 20 miles here. Taking public transit from Astoria to the beach I’m assuming takes a very long time as well even though the distance isn’t really that far.
In Raleigh, 20 miles is nothing and won’t get us to Durham or Chapel Hill. Trying to get to the beach is impossible without a car. So a car is unfortunately necessary here. It is doable to get by without a car, but that’s if you don’t plan on doing anything other than getting basic necessities and visiting the same parks/museums over and over.
Given this, I would eventually like to move to Queens or someplace near DC.
I’ve lived in a far reaching suburb of San Francisco, but I would use BART to get into the city for work. Outside of that, it was mainly car oriented although the bus system wasn’t terrible. I did use the bus in the suburbs to get to work for a while.
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Fact is, in the US (except a few major cities like NY) a car is pretty much a necessity. Europe and a lot of the rest of the world. A car is more luxury. People have them and use them, but it’s not the only option, and therefore a lot of people don’t.
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I don’t know about other countries outside Europe, but I know in Europe gas is way more expensive which helps drive this demand for transit. It’s part of the reason why I wouldn’t mind some increases of gas costs. It’s just too cheap to live far away from the city. Arguably it isn’t that cheap when you take into account car maintenance but a lot of people don’t take that into consideration. I wouldn’t mind the increase of gas prices to get this, but I know people will throw a fit.
Can you imagine $5.57/gallon here? People threw a fit about gas prices in the Bay Area when they were $5/gallon. It did cause people to use public transit and get overall better gas mileage cars.
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The ugliness of parking decks is not the problem that I hope to solve, honestly. Treating parking as a primarily aesthetic problem misses the point entirely.
The real problem is:
- The crushing traffic that will inevitably result if our entire downtown is redeveloped with this level of density, with this sort of parking ratio and the continued assumption that 1 person = 1 car.
- The extra cost of construction (and the friction it creates against densification and urbanization), when the “market” supposedly demands insane parking ratios and expects roughly 1 sqft of parking deck floor area per 1sqft of office space
- The amount of carbon that all those cars spew into the atmosphere, the dust and rubber pellets that get washed down the drain, into rivers, and on into the ocean
- The space that those cars take up on the street, at the expense of cyclists and pedestrians
- The noise that cars make
- The cyclists pedestrians that get maimed or killed because some driver wasn’t careful enough, or because some traffic engineer followed a paint-by-numbers playbook to design a road, and will get killed and maimed at a higher rate as traffic increases
I keep hoping that at some point we can turn this around, and developers will start recognizing all this parking as excess - and new buildings will be built with less or none, and the developers of the original buildings with too much parking, can start leasing out their excess spaces to people who will drive to the new parking-free and parking-light developements.
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I don’t think anyone here thinks parking is a primarily aesthetic problem.
I can’t wait for a future where we’re less car-dependent and parking isn’t something that we even need to pay attention to designing. But we’re far off from that, and until then, parking is going to be a part of our built environment, and it’s one that has an awful impact on the pedestrian experience. And I think we should be designing to mitigate the effects of that. Not because we want to, but because we have to. I do think stand-alone decks are better in this regard because they can be redeveloped more easily in the future.
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My primary complaint is that existing public parking decks in downtown Raleigh are rarely completely full. Most people think of them as full because the first two or three floors are and they don’t want to have to drive up five or six ramps to park.
So, if we’re going to keep putting a parking deck in every new high-rise we build, we really need to start capping at like two or three floors instead of the atrocious five to eight that we keep seeing. And we certainly shouldn’t we wasting an entire block on a single parking deck (edit: unless it can be easily replaced, as @elevatoroperator mentioned, but I don’t see the existing Bloc83 deck going anywhere for at least a decade or more). That’s such terrible land use.
I respectfully disagree. I stumbled across this Wikipedia article on modal share yesterday. When you go to the first table and sort by the “Private Motor Vehicle” column from high to low, you find that the top thirty-two cities (excluding one) are either in North America or Australia.
I don’t think most Americans realize how abnormal it is that we drive everywhere all the time. Most “advanced” countries aren’t doing this. Imagine how much more space we’d have for housing in downtown if we could get even one in five people to take a mode other than a personal vehicle. You could take one floor in each building with a five-story parking deck and convert it to housing. And that’s not a very high bar.
Cars are terrible geometry. More often than not, you’re fitting one to two people in a massive metal box that then has to be stored somewhere. Other countries have figured out that they really don’t work well in urban contexts. Cities like Amsterdam and Paris were mostly driver-centric for decades and have made policy changes that make it more convenient to take other modes. We don’t have to be car-centric. We do it because it’s what we’re familiar and comfortable with. That’s all.
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I agree that all the parking decks suck, but tenants will demand them until there is dependable, convenient, comfortable public transportation and/or downtown is so dense and populated that they aren’t needed.
I used to live in DC and loved it. I walked and rode the metro 90% of the time, basically only using my car for groceries and road trips.
Raleigh isn’t DC. If you want amenities downtown, you have to provide an easy way for people to get down there to access them.
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I just did some quick math. DRA estimates 21,000 people live within a mile of downtown. Our metro is 1.4 million people, which doesn’t even count the Durham side of the Triangle. So less than 1.5% of the MSA’s population lives within generous walking distance. The vast majority of those people are going to drive to get downtown, or they aren’t coming.
If you are a developer building office space, you are going to make sure that 98.5% of the population can access your building.
IMO, the only actor that can change this is the government, and they need to do it by providing public transportation that riders of choice will choose to use.
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Speaking of parking maximums…
https://community.dtraleigh.com/t/the-raleigh-wire-service/748/1425
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