I’ve been a big fan of the DDA’s management of parking over the years, but lately, perhaps due to pressure from the City for more and more money, it seems their eyes have grown bigger than their stomachs.

Making downtown attractive to customers, particularly year-round county residents, for shopping and eating ought to be the number one priority. The food and retail customers are the folks that use hourly parking and a drop in that demand to me, is an important indicator of downtown health.

I’m also concerned that a hotel and convention center, built for sporadic use by out-of-town guests, and putting yet more public money at risk, will make things worse, not better. Downtown should be building on its status as a regional draw, not trying to become a national draw, which it never will be.

I love downtown, but it’s not a good place if you’re encumbered with a car. Suburbia, or whatever those places are, is not my favorites place, but the abundant and free parking is pretty beguiling. For some reason, this makes less difference to me in summer than in winter–I guess walking a few blocks in cold, slushy downtown makes it even less attractive.

The other piece of info here is that I’ve also heard of downtown businesses that REALLY want parking passes, but can’t get them. So, there is apparently some level of demand in the system for parking, at least for monthly parking passes, if not for hourly parking.

It seems clear to me that the increased parking rates have resulted in decreased demand. Decreased demand means fewer customers for downtown businesses, unless they are finding other ways to get downtown. Unfortunately, the data also shows a decrease in AATA ridership over the same period.

The point remains that the City and DDA are betting heavily on parking demand and revenue remaining high in order to fund the City as well as substantial amounts of debt. Rather than glossing over the data (and comparing months with different numbers of business days), they should be taking a very concerted and critical look at these numbers. The DDA has already had to resort to TIF revenues to fund this debt. It’s a serious issue.

I am also interested in seeing data on how much revenue has been generated by the City’s installation of parking meters outside of the DDA boundary. The staff projections were deemed to be quite overly optimistic by the Mayor and Council, yet they supported limited installations anyway. I wonder if anyone has bothered to track this. Anecdotally, the several dozen meters installed on S. Division seem to be largely unused, except for a few at William and a few at Packard.

Weather will have an effect on parking usage from year to year. If Nov 2010 was colder or snowier than Nov 2009 more people will have stayed home and not have gone out as much.

Analyzing a one year increase/decrease in numbers without looking at other parameters really tells you nothing statistically. You can’t really gather any true information from it.

A more accurate way of looking at this is to look at quarterly or yearly numbers over a wide range of years, say 5 years or so. That will tell you the trend and the direction of the parking demand.

Depends on your definition of significant, I suppose. Is a 3.5% drop in hourly demand significant?

November 2009 had twenty-four business days with a total of 179,865 hourly patrons, or an average of 7494 hourly patrons per day.

November 2010 had twenty-FIVE business days with a total of 180,727 hourly patrons, or an average of 7229 hourly patrons per day.

This means there were 265 fewer hourly patrons per day, on average, when comparing November 2009 and November 2010. Put another way, the demand for hourly parking dropped 3.5% in November 2010 when compared to November 2009.

I’m concerned that the City and DDA have relied on projections of ever-increasing parking demand to justify the new underground structure. Now they are relying on ever-increasing parking revenue to pay the debt for the structure, to fund the City’s coffers to the tune of $2.5 million per year, as well as pay for pending projects like the City Apartments parking structure. Meanwhile, it would appear that hourly parking demand has decreased as the rates were increased. In about a year, we will be adding 600-700 MORE spaces to the supply when the new structure opens, along with all of the operating costs that come with that.

The laws of diminishing marginal returns, and supply and demand, would seem to indicate that the parking revenue well may be starting to run dry. Already, the DDA has admitted that it will need TIF money to make payments on the new underground structure, something that was denied by the DDA, City Council, and City staff for the past two years.

With the stakes for parking revenue this high, I think the parking data deserves far more than “short shrift” and spin from a board that is seeking to be the shepherd for the development of City-owned lots (including the engagement of the public in this process).