Sunday, March 8, 2009

'Build a lot and they will park', Kevin Costner's character in A League of Their Own

Parking Design
(So Costner wasn't in that film, maybe Bull Durham? I'm no parking engineer nor a movie expert so please accept this as a disclaimer)
Below is an illustration I made to show the design proposal reviewed Thursday and some of my suggestions for parking that I have repeatedly shared with the Bergmann-LeChase CRCDS crowd. Click the image to see it larger and read my notes, the blue (new design) areas are from my memory where the new design proposed changes, the West expansion and stairway are crude and somewhat inaccurate because I left off a few spaces, and the stairway was very neatly drawn, just with peculiar shifts that I captured in an impressionistic kind of way with shapes.
The red bits are the abandoned footprints of the original design
The green shows some of the areas I have suggested could provide parking that would in my opinion be less costly, less destructive of green spaces and to avoid the dramatic encroachment on 'the hill' and neighbors or solve an accessibility issue. I am only plugging in a total of 103 space additions as there has been little feedback to my proposals so I am showing a range of options that are less desirable, but maybe easier to execute.
As I have shared in the past, parking would in fact be less convenient in the proposed lower lots because while walking distances appear to be identical the extra crazy driving to the lower lot makes it unappealing unless you crave the roller coaster experience, want to waste time and brake pads etc.. I also shared an observation at the meeting that no other parking consumers at CRCDS would be competing for those convenient to ACS spaces, as they would be absolutely inconvenient. to the rest of campus like the proposal, some more driving would be required, and it would be a slightly longer walk. The 50 and counting spots in the front would mean that the back lot with it's 73 spaces wouldn't see cars for the main campus activities until the prior capacity reached over 90%. I described at the meeting how the major aerial map viewing websites illustrate this pattern.

Google shows ~50 to the West with only 1 in the East which probably was the catering van and shouldn't count.
Microsoft Live shows over 100 to 15 but only two empty spaces appear to the West of the East lot where at least two of the 15 were CRCDS vehicles.
Lastly Zillow chimes in at 70 to zero, that's just fishy don't you think? Surely I must be hacking into their image databases and Photoshopping these results because people would not park so predictably.

Maybe they will decide to build a parking garage.

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