I find it interesting that with the new year comes increased monthly parking prices. Parking underneath City Plaza is now $150 a month and another said the Blount Street deck is at $160 a month. I have other arrangements but can others report in if parking (monthly prices) are increasing?
Out in Perimeter Park we have enough parking for each person to each have 2.5 spaces. And it is all Free. (well… at the cost of working in the middle of nowhere)
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I pay for our interns parking at work. The Blount Street deck (shared with sky house and Edison) and the Moore Square Deck both went up to $125 a month at the end of last year.
If providing market rate housing at more affordable rates was the result, I’d be all for reducing parking requirements for housing. HOWEVER, I’ll bet my life that the reduction in parking will be profit motivated for the developer while pushing any problems into the public realm and at any increased costs to their residents.
That parking isn’t free. It is just built into the cost of doing business there and might ultimately trickle down to a lower paycheck for you.
My favorite parking lot has increased in value with the recent county re-evaluations. The 6 parking spaces at the corner of Hargett and Wilmington are now valued at $1,439,038. That’s $239,839.66 per space. 
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Getting rid of the Moloks made the property value skyrocket!!
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I would think that a developer would want to also purchase the land the M&T bank is on to develop the whole lot together. I hope this happens after 121 Fayetteville starts, could be a nice cluster of towers!
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N&O’s article from yesterday says the City’s recommendation for the developer is to provide underground parking. So there’s hope maybe some of it will be hidden, I’m sure they will want underground access to the Convention Center like the Marriott.
“The recommendation says having a convention center headquarters hotel and tower with on-site, underground parking would help serve millions of annual visitors to downtown, increase residential and retail space downtown and help recruit a major anchor tenant.”
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/wake-county/article239498378.html
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I thought the $30M was going to extend Fayetteville Street another block to the south? Am I missing something? Or are we expecting a developer to extend Fayetteville street another block to the south as part of the development?
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I have to imagine the subterranean parking will extend on both sides of Fayetteville and be capped with the towers on either end and the Fayetteville extension in the middle, kind of like City Plaza.
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Hmmm. I wonder if they’ll dig out under South Street as well…
I guess the idea is that this will be like blocks 1 and 2 with parking spanning both blocks and Fayetteville Street built above it?
Anyway, I just keep waiting for the day when we can stop building so much parking. Think of what that $30m could buy if we didn’t have to entomb it in a parking pit beneath Fayetteville Street. $30m is a not-small portion of the cost of one of the BRT corridors, for example. Or perhaps a land bridge for Dix.
But without infinity parking spaces, how will people get downtown? Ride the bus, gus. Our city is sprawling and the bus system has gaps and long trip times when planning trips from (anywhere) to (anywhere) but things look much better when your destination is downtown. There are dozens of routes radiating directly from downtown out into all corners of the city and most corners of the region, that will get you from an outlying stop to downtown in approximately the same amount of time as driving and winding your way through a labyrinthine parking deck to a parking space. Basically all of these routes run at least every 30 minutes at rush hour.
Of course this won’t work for everybody - but there are plenty of people who it would work for, and would do it if they weren’t benefitting from the subsidization and externalization of parking costs.
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Completely agreed! And your excellent point should be “shouted” at our new City Council at every meeting…IMHO 
Eh, I’m not super familiar with bus routes, but the ones I am familiar with, it’s often a 20-30 min walk from the neighborhoods. So walk to bus, then ride bus to downtown OR drive to downtown in the same time period it would take you to get to the bus stop.
At work, I drive to various places throughout the week. So I’ll pull up the address on Google maps to figure out how long it will take so I know when I gotta leave to be on time. More often than not it shows, as example, 17 min drive, 48 min bus. Uh, yeah no thanks.
If the city wants people to use the bus, THIS MUST BE FIXED. (<<<emphasis not shouting)
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Using the destination “downtown raleigh” on Google maps is imprecise and may add extra time because it plunks you some random spot somewhere downtown. The #2 from Whitaker Mill/Pine to Moore Square is scheduled to be a 16 minute ride. And before you say “that’s twice driving” think about the time it takes to find parking and walk from there to your destination. In my experience that can take several minutes, especially during the day on a weekday. For somewhere near Fayetteville Street or Moore Square, the bus is competitive enough that more people would ride if parking were less plentiful/less subsidized.
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My point is the travel time to the bus stop. Sure it might be a 16 min ride, but that’s only half the travel time. Using Moore Square, it’s 25 mins total travel time. Not sure if the time of night will affect this, and I’m certainly not worried about finding a parking spot at 10pm on a Weds night. Other neighborhoods, this is amplified even more. For example, Renaissance Park, off Tryon rd. 48 mins from random house to Moore Square right now. 9 mins by car. Same distance as the Whitaker Mill address I used earlier. Right now the buses seem designed for folks who do not own a car and have no other choice but to use a bus.
As for “if parking were less plentiful,” I’m of the opinion that if you make artificial barriers to going downtown (such as reducing parking below current parking demand), people just won’t go downtown. The solution to this seems to me is more housing downtown. More people living downtown, the less people need to drive, the less parking is necessary, ie reduce demand.
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I don’t think making parking less plentiful is an artificial barrier. If we did not subsidize parking so much, it would be less plentiful. Forcing parking to respond to the market and letting the users pay the full price, then other options may be considered. Right now you can park for free or way below cost nearly anytime downtown.
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For a look at what I think represents the best urban layout for efficient bus routing, take a look at east Portland OR. It has several parallel commercial corridors with all residential in between. Just send the buses along those corridors. No person in a residential areas is over 4 blocks from a bus line. Most of those either have a bridge to downtown or converge on a bridge to downtown. North Seattle is similar. Raleigh’s terrible bus situation is a fundamental problem hitched to how the roads are laid out. It’ll never be good, and will always cost more than it should to get service levels up to match areas with short lead times. Just increasing density on one hand (to create walkable little islands here and there), and bus service on another will never make up for the fact the physical layout of this city must be corrected at some point or it’ll be doomed to a deteriorating quality of life.
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