I was wondering the same. I’d have expected peak times to be F-Sat evenings; wonder what the occupancy is like then.
I’m not in Raleigh nearly as often as I used to be a decade ago, but back then I’d definitely encounter a few evenings where I didn’t find a spot until the top level or two of the deck. Still, we’ve got more than enough parking.
Having walked through those parking decks on F-Sat, they are almost dead empty. Anyone that complains about parking on the weekends being difficult is not aware of the existence of the parking decks.
That’s so drastically different than what I remember from my college years, wow.
Does anyone know if the state has any plans whatsoever to build something on this enormous block-sized surface parking lot on the corner of Wilmington/Jones?
Or, likewise, the other one next to it on Person St. which is just as bad.
The History Museum expansion will develop the adjacent block in Phase 2, supposedly. First phase will just be a renovation of the existing building I think.
Isnt this where the Gov’s reception rooms are going as well?
when i enter a city i am unfamiliar with I always look for a parking deck to park for desired foot or bike travel.
This is why people complain that parking “is hard”. I get it now. I mean just read this top to bottom and try not to give up.
Realistically $2/hr isn’t bad. Signs that get me confused are some that would be the night/weekend flat rate. I normally don’t park for more than a couple of hours. So in this case $4 or even $8 isn’t bad. If a flat rate is $8, but I only plan on staying for 2 hours, then I’m paying a higher price for parking.
I also get more worried about getting my car towed than paying a parking fee. A parking fee is not convenient, but getting your car towed or a major fine is what I don’t like.
The city parking garages seem to have good information as far as their parking garages are concerned. There’s quite a few of them as well so it’s really not difficult to find parking in downtown Raleigh.
The same also applies to areas that are not downtown Raleigh. The dock appears to have started to charge for parking. Lynnwood does have parking validation, but I found it interesting that they are charging for parking too.
This reads like the city is bending over backwards to identify every opportunity for people to park for free. To me, this just encourages more driving.
Given that the city has started charging for its short route circular (RLine) that’s often paired with evenings of free parking, it just seems to me that the city is enabling and prioritizing driving as much as possible. Why would I hop a fee based short
urban route bus if I can just drive from place to place and park for free?
Now that the city has to compete with fake urban places like North Hills where you can park for free, it feels like the city is going down a similar path to when they were faced with the competition from enclosed malls back in the day. Downtown is not going to beat suburbia at its own game. It’s not going to happen.
The city needs to find ways to enable as much housing as it can get in its core and change the narrative to offer more people more choices by their own feet and by the limited transit we have. We have to stop letting cars dictate all the rules and our strategy. We have to stop letting single family homeowners just beyond downtown proper prevent the density that will free us from the monopoly that prioritizes drivers over transit riders and walkers.
While I agree with all that, I do feel that’s being slowly chipped away at with the removal of parking minimums, missing middle, and backyard cottages. More can be done, like lots of TOD, and I do think we’re getting there but not fast enough, from my perspective.
For me, when you break down the response, “It’s too hard to park in downtown Raleigh.” there are many aspects of it like price, unpredictability, lack of knowledge, safety concerns that play into it. I actually think that price is not the #1 concern here. I do actually think that a lot of people are either willing to pay or hesitant to pay but will do it anyway that this is not the deterrent. The main deterrent, in my opinion, is confusion.
I strongly feel downtown’s parking perception could immediately improve by a huge margin if we somehow simplified it all and it was standard across every parking entity. Since this can’t happen due to mixed ownership and incentives, the next best thing is communication.
I heard that Dock 1053 is now using an app-based solution for their parking, can anyone confirm? This tells me that parking is not just downtown’s problem anymore.
Last, I hope parking becomes a problem in more and more places as that might just make calls for more and more alternatives like transit. That’s still long-term though so for now, downtown needs to communicate and make it as easy as it can be.
The DRA is not helping either. Take a look at their parking page: Parking | Getting Around | Downtown Raleigh, NC
This is all begs for a nuanced conversation to address how we activate downtown NOW while we wait for a future iteration of it that can substantially demote the accommodation of cars and still be wildly successful.
I suggest that we already have the building blocks for the roadmap on how to get there. However, let’s first look back on history a bit…
Many city centers in the past relied heavily on folks who came downtown for work each day, and since the 1950s, that model has been largely built around the car. Make it easy for folks who live in the suburbs to drive into the city and park. Our cities plowed over urban neighborhoods of the marginalized for freeways. We plowed over our history for parking lots. We disrupted our grids and blocks and de-emphasized the value of the pedestrian. We made it easy for folks to drive in the city, park near their work and quickly exit the city after work each day.
We have learned from the pandemic that this model isn’t successful today and that following it comes with great risk of failure. While this model did contribute to the nearby casual lunch businesses pre-Covid, the substantially reduced numbers of these commuters today are massively contributing to the struggles of those very specific businesses.
In the pre-Covid era, the strategy for our city centers started pushing toward a more balanced approach. Mixed-use development started infiltrating our vocabulary. As suburbia started exploding in footprint over the decades, more and more folks started re-evaluating its effectiveness for their lives. A renewed interest in living closer to ones job and quality of time started became bigger factors in our decision making. The trouble was (and still is) that suburbia had already poached our city cores of most all of the resources that it once had. Shopping and services abandoned downtowns in favor of where their customers went. If we could just get some residents into the city center to balance out the businesses, we’d be fine…so we thought. We’d sprinkle in some street festivals throughout the year, build a convention center and have some entertainment options and our city centers will be strong.
Well, as we all know, Covid disrupted that narrative and we have to respond appropriately or downtown will continue to fail to live up to its possibilities. Let’s start with asking why our services and shopping remain in the burbs? For me, it’s simple. It’s because that’s where the people live. The services and retail followed the beds and adapted to their new built environment for the last 3/4 of a century. Their long standing business models have it baked in. It’s going to be difficult to change. I think that this is why parking always seems to bubble to the top of potential “solutions” to our problems.
If retail and services follow the beds, then it’s easy to imagine that the city should focus on how to get as much housing in its core as quickly as possible. I think that mixed use is still the goal, but since Covid I think that the thumb has to be placed ever harder on the balance of housing. Our most densely populated urban neighborhoods need to aspire to being complex, multi-dimensional neighborhoods that are rich with activities, services and needs of daily life, not just entertainment districts that people drive to. They are only going to get there with more people living in their walkshed where parking isn’t the primary consideration for experiencing them.
Yes, this is correct, and the signage is quite confusing for getting your parking validated.
Realistically I think the whole “It’s too hard to park in downtown Raleigh” will always be there. I’d ignore it because downtown always seems to be quite full when there’s events going on. Those event goers never seem to have problems finding parking and that’s when it’s during the busiest time.
North Hills has areas that have reserved parking in their garages (I’ve seen in the Bank of America tower).
As well as North Hills does, I actually think that downtown Raleigh equally does quite well in some sections. I think it’s just overall perception. North Hills mainly has 1-2 streets where most people are funneled into (Main St and Park at N Hills St). This causes pedestrians to be more in the same area which indicates more activity. In Downtown, there are quite a few cross streets which allows pedestrians to spread out more.
During events at the performing arts center on the south side, there is quite a bit of activity that happens. There’s just nowhere for those people to really go close by on Fayetteville St. shortly after (realistically they are probably ready to go home anyway). Red Hat Amphitheater has a similar thing. It gets quite busy during music events, but you won’t see this on Fayetteville St.
As much as people complain about Moore Square, there tends to be quite a bit of foot traffic there as well. Again you won’t know it when you’re on Fayetteville St.
On the west side, I tend to see a quite a bit of foot traffic from Publix all the way down to Davie Street on Glenwood Avenue and West St. I think the housing here definitely helps.
Agreed. They need to start looking at ways to get Glenwood South to expand west and get higher density housing to expand east. There is a lot of housing that’s coming in, so I think there is a movement towards it.
I’d like to see housing increased closest to Glenwood partially due to the proximity to the bus lines that take you to either Crabtree or North Hills. Since the bus only take a little bit longer than using a car, I can see people opting to use the bus instead.
Here’s some units that were recently completed, or in progress, downtown.
| Complex | Units | Stories |
|---|---|---|
| Maeve | 296 | 20 |
| Platform Apartments | 442 | 7 |
| Mira | 288 | 7 |
| Acorn | 106 | 7 |
| 400H | 242 | 20 |
| Signal | 298 | 6 |
| The Miles | 204 | 7 |
| The Point | 74 | 6 |
| Alexan | 187 | 7 |
| 2137 |
I’ve noticed the same thing. I think this is because events are on the weekend and weekend rates/hours are easy. It’s either free or a flat fee. People seem to get that.
I think the challenge would be to go after those that want to come downtown for a weekday lunch or weekday dinner. We deter this because there’s practically nothing here that’s free and rates vary.
I’m NOT advocating to make more parking free. However, I do think better informed residents will make it work once they “get it”. For example, a lot of private lots just use an app-based system and charge 24/7. If people had the app installed and setup ahead of time, the process is much easier.
If we could figure out a way to have raleighites know that you “Park once and Walk” vs “park near my destination” then I think perception would start to get more positive.
Anyway, I’m toying with something that I hope to share and get feedback on.
I have never been to an actual city where parking is “easy.”
I have even heard quite a few people complaining that they don’t go to Crabtree Valley Mall because the parking is “hard”.
People like that - forget about them. When it comes to things related to downtown, they don’t matter.
I usually have an easier time parking downtown than Crabtree during peak shopping days. But then I am willing to walk, and know the lot/deck I want.
I hate those apps, in fact most apps, and will find an alternative to downloading something else that I will struggle to use. Please, give us back the coin meters!!! I always go to the deck.
I think we can all agree that placemaking is the more important, if not the most important, thing a city and its leaders should focus on.
We need more parks, streeteries, shaded areas, retailers, proper bike infra, etc. and we don’t get those additions through unlimited parking accessibility.
Ironically, if downtown was more activated on the daily rather than sporadically for one off events then those ‘outsider inbounders’ you speak of might better understand / have a plan for how to possibly navigate the infinite maze that is DTR ( Big ole sarcasm font, pause)…
I live outside the CBD. I could feasibly make it into the center on bike - it’s a hassle, dare I say dangerous if not super annoying due to infrastructure issues that have been covered ad nauseum, 'cause it’s a HIKE into ‘this fuggin’Chitty’…
I come into the CBD anywhere from half a dozen times to a dozen times a week - sometimes for a morning meet up and then back for an evening adventure. Gasp. Never had parking ‘issues’. Anyone who does is really bitching about not being able to park the Tahoe in front of wherever for a dash in and truly, to hell with those folks - they’ll never find happiness.
I look forward to the increasing density of vibrant diversely activated hubs all around town and I look forward (longingly at times) to options to get there without my car. Those options do seem to be coming - albeit at a ‘snail’s let’s study this some more’ pace. In the interim, I’ve got options and so do many of the citizens of Raleigh and it’s what makes it great, probably getting better by the day despite the myopic nit-picking that’s way too easy to do around here. Let’s keep building density from the heart of town and working out into those emerging vibrant hubs.
More options for all peoples. More good things. More good times…
Too bad that so many that live outside the immediate downtown area apparently have a bus aversion.
Since GoRaleigh runs a hub system all busses converge on a central location as proximate to downtown destinations as the many parking decks off Wilmington with no parking hassle and minimal expense.
Even with no bus service on the street where they live could basically park-and-ride from a free parking lot along a nearby bus service corridor.
That’s how I come and go from the Village District area to the downtown proper. And why I support increasing frequency of service over expansion of service areas.
