im not sure. my folks were always state employees. my folks could not drive so we always took a bus or combination of cab and bus or a ride and bus. at first a bus from longview took my dad to salisbury st. but a car commute would have been easy to a parking lot attatched to the admistration bldg downtown. from brentwood some years later a bus went by our house front door…super easy bus ride and had we had a car a 6 mile drive down capital. 15 minutes maybe and once past the hodges light just a couple of turns into a state bldg parking lot. his state office then moved to 3700 falls of the neuse and from north ridge villas he never had to go downtown again. for a brief bit i recall NCDOT had offices set up in an old Kroger on Atlantic ave. anyway his commute was 2 mile bus hop or a super easy car ride if he had one. when my folks sold their north ridge villas house a state employee happend to buy it. a downtown employee. i think it was a 4 mile straight shot into downtown…an easy drive, iow. i know prior to that there were a lot of programmers and other state and county employees from wake forest commuting into downtown…and i guess even much worse now with all the new development.
i thnk a recent post showed a rezoning of a lot off of s. blount to be in excess of 7 sotries? with this type of continual dowtown densi-fying a mesh like transit service downtown might help a number of folks out for some types of commutes…especially if most of them will end up working downtown. if they happen to be a teacher at wakefield HS, maybe not so much.
Saw this on one of the local news sites. Has Raleigh city council ever done anything like this for our city decks?
This.
You don’t realize how much parallel parking clutters up the streetscape until you go somewhere without it.
Our streets are narrow and we need room for things like cycle tracks, bus lanes, wider sidewalks, sidewalk dining, street trees, etc. If parallel parking downtown went away tomorrow, I would totally dance for joy in the (newly uncluttered) street.
No man, un for it i hope they throw in the Parallel parking towel tonight.
Many people in Raleigh bitched for years because the city funded the Light+Time tower, and I think it was like $50,000. It even became political fodder for Tom Fetzer: Raleigh’s mayor’s back in the 90s.
Raleigh does have an art screen: the Shimmer Wall on the back side of the convention center.
i still wish Fayetteville st was a pedestrian mall
Not sure who paid for it, but the sides of the Wake County deck that are now covered by the L Apartments had a huge art mural screen covering the blank wall before the apartments were built.
Leo snapped a photo of them way back in 2011:
https://dtraleigh.com/2011/08/pic-of-the-week-88/
Those were truly the BEST
The City of Raleigh has eliminated requirements for developers to provide a minimum amount of parking for projects in the city in order to allow for additional density and walkability.
Surprise just say NO Cox objected !!
This is what’s driving me nuts about the current plans for reworking Blount St. between Edenton and Martin. Last I checked, they’re planning to combine the bike and bus lanes on this segment because they “don’t have room for both,” but they’re still including parallel parking on the east side of the street. Do we really need those twenty or so spots when there’s two parking garages on this segment?
https://raleighnc.gov/projects/blount-st-person-st-two-way-conversion-project I had read this project before but I missed this: “Because of preliminary traffic analysis and the functioning of the BRT, staff has chosen to not make any improvements to the section between MLK Boulevard and Edenton Street”. One comment from the last survey sticks out to me:
Why are the roads only being improved in the sections of downtown that have money and the area around Shaw University – traditionally poor – being completely left out (again) by the city’s improvement initiatives? Why does affluent and white take precedent over anyone else? And why are we going to keep that same section a one-way drag strip of death, while the higher income sections are getting much calmer, two way traffic?
That’s an interesting analysis. Totally get their concern too. I’m guessing the postponement is because that segment will also be getting a bus lane once the Western/Southern BRT corridors are implemented, and those are still in design phase. Don’t want to have to rework the street twice in five years.
As I recall, this was exactly the reasoning given by the city for removing the southern half of Blount/Person from the 2-way conversion plan.
I’m of two minds about it. My door opens on this section of Person and I walk this section of the road almost every day. I was very much looking forward to the reduced vehicle speeds and a sooner 1-way conversion would benefit me personally sooner. I also agree that it doesn’t make sense to spend the money reconfiguring it just to rip it up and re-do it in a few years. The risk I see is if the Southern BRT gets delayed or re-routed (or even shelved if the New Bern BRT isn’t seen as a success), reconfiguration of this section may continually be punted and it may just never happen.
I secretly wonder if the people making the decisions would actually prefer to keep the southern section of Blount/Person as a relatively high-throughput automobile corridor (seeing as Raleigh never built a freeway through downtown when all the other post-war cities were doing so and it connects directly to 40), but excluding only the section in southeast Raleigh while planning it was politically untenable and this is just a convenient way to slowly forget about the conversation and keep it car-focused. Removes tinfoil hat.
I think elimination of minimum parking requirements will turn out to be a good idea in 98% of cases. I am apprehensive, however, about medical offices – especially pediatric offices. Even with the minimums that were in place, developers tended to rely on adjacent neighborhood streets as overflow parking. This really irritates the neighborhood.
Did Cox offer up his front yard for additional city parking?
As usual, they didn’t provide any useful context. This parking garage fronts Main Street and would have some sort of screening at a minimum. If they went with something more basic and repetitive instead of the custom art panels, I’m sure they’d save some money, but I’d bet that the art is not a half-million dollar cost add. The cost of the screening was probably built into the building’s construction budget, and the general public has no idea how expensive construction actually is.
If that’s the case, I’d like to see this presented more like: “Durham had a 420k allowance for metal panel screening of this parking deck. City council voted to pay a 100k premium to hire an artist + fabricator out of Colorado to produce a custom design.”
That makes sense. I’d add that this isn’t really much different than Raleigh getting artwork on the new Capital Blvd bridge over Peace Street and the connecting bridge from Wade to Capital, right?
For sure, although I’d argue even in that case the art is pretty additive/not as integral to a bridge as screening is considered to a parking garage.
The other thing bugging me about the article is that this parking deck is part of a new affordable housing development. No mention of that – just a quote from someone saying “this money could be better spent on affordable housing!!!” 
Local journalism needs to do better.