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Free Parking?

Start a discussion of the health of downtown Knoxville, and somebody will say, Buddy, what they need is some free parking. And, often, they'll mention the extravagant success of Calhoun's by the River, a downtown restaurant that offers plentiful adjacent free parking.

However, each example may get you into a thicket of exceptions and ironies that may suggest the truth is more complicated. One of downtown's most successful restaurants after Calhoun's is the Tomato Head, which, being located in the middle of Market Square, offers no adjacent parking at all, free or otherwise. From its patio, there's not even a parking lot visible on the horizon. Most of the hundreds who pack the Tomato Head at lunch time and on weekend nights park a block or two away, and many willingly pay to do so.

And if convenient, free parking were downtown's salvation, you'd think we might see some reason for hope on Sundays. That's the one day of the week that all street parking downtown is officially free and always plentiful. It's been like that for years.

Sunday might seem a particular boon for downtown, because, in most of Knox County, Sunday afternoon is a huge time for restaurant sales. Downtown has Knoxville's highest concentration of restaurants, among them several of the city's best-known and most-respected eateries. And downtown has five large, healthy churches, all of which let out at noon and deliver thousands of hungry parishioners to the downtown streets. In addition, it's the public library's biggest day of the week, and it's not unusual for the Tennessee Theatre to be packed on a Sunday afternoon for a movie or concert. Throw in free parking, and it might seem like a restaurant bonanza waiting to happen.

But on free-parking Sunday afternoon, downtown retail is deader than any other day of the week. Most of the few restaurants and shops that do good business on Saturday don't even bother on Sunday. Recently a few restaurants have experimented with adding Sunday hours—and then given up on it.

Parking is most expensive downtown from 9 a.m.-5 p.m., and MPC studies show the supply of parking is tightest between noon and 1 p.m. But that's when downtown restaurants do their biggest business.

How our obsession with having a space to park our car drives Knoxville's development as a city.

by Jack Neely

It's not news that downtown Knoxville's suddenly crowded with big, promising projects: riverfront development, a convention center, a justice center. The fruition of many longtime dreams, several of these are among the largest building projects ever attempted in East Tennessee, and each has the potential to be what its dreamers imagined. However, all these projects will fail unless they come to grips with one mundane reality: they've all got to supply us with somewhere to park our cars.

Of course, there are plausible alternatives to universal parking. Better public transportation, better allowance for vehicles that hardly need parking (i.e., bicycles), and more residential development downtown within walking distance of where residents work and entertain themselves. Each of these would relieve the need for automobile parking, and in recent years, Knoxville has made surprising strides in some of these areas.

However, even the most idealistic admit that for the future we can see from here—and probably for the rest of our lifetimes—the majority of Knoxvillians will indeed drive, and before participating in anything at all, each will demand to be provided with a flat space of about 100 square feet on which to store each of their vehicles. And to comply with those demands, public and private developers will have to compromise their plans, raise project estimates, destroy buildings, close thriving businesses, sometimes even destroy other parking lots.

We may think of parking as a particular issue of concern downtown—which, not coincidentally, can be defined as that part of the city that developed before introduction of the automobile, and automobile parking. However, parking is a huge, expensive problem in the suburbs, as well. Large, "free" suburban parking lots do enable us to drive to the places we need to go. But they're also the reason we have to drive so far. If not for expansive parking lots—the chief culprit in the commercial sprawl that has swallowed thousands of acres of Knox County farmland—most the businesses along Kingston Pike could be almost walkably compact. Due to the necessity of parking lots in the suburbs and the zoning laws that support it, businesses are much farther apart—which makes driving a car on every trip to the store a near-necessity in the suburbs. And which, in turn, makes parking lots a necessity, too.

Barring a revolution in urban consciousness, that's a reality. And Mike Edwards, of the Public Building Authority, is a realist. There are over 16,000 parking places downtown today, which some studies have indicated is well ahead of the demand. However, Edwards says that in the next couple of years they'll have to build 2-3,000 more. "We're getting objections from people who say, Why are you building more parking? A parking garage is not an end in itself," Edwards says. "It's just one of those damn things you have to do."

Edwards has lately been preoccupied with two huge public projects: the Knoxville Convention Center and the Knox County Justice Center. It's claimed that the two centers will ultimately help downtown. Each project will call for hundreds of new parking spaces. Each project will also destroy hundreds of existing parking spaces. Some worry that they may do something similar to business.

Jim Overbey runs Kimball's Jewelers, a Gay Street institution since 1933. It's the last fine jewelry store downtown, and is easily one of downtown's oldest retail establishments. Employing about 18, he has successfully kept his business afloat on a block of Gay Street that business once nearly abandoned. Now, suddenly, the whole city seems to be crowding in on the once-forlorn 400 block—KUB is going in across the street, the Justice Center occupying most of State Street behind—and Overbey is worried about where his employees and customers are going to park their cars, and how much they'll have to pay. When supply dwindles and demand rises, this businessman knows what usually happens.

"Parking is going sky-high," he says. Overbey understands parking companies' motives to raise rates as high as possible. "You'd be a damn fool if you didn't," he says.

Indeed, Leo Shelton, president of Knox All Right Inc.—which controls over 5,000 parking spaces in town—isn't about to make any guarantees that parking rates will stay the same. "Our business is based on supply and demand," he says. "A lot of things are happening in Knoxville taking the supply out of downtown. If rates are increased, it will be because of that temporary lack." He suggests rates may slide back to normal after all the projects are completed; but, of course, that might be a couple of years yet.

All this is coinciding with a private-parking development that has worried some parking consumers already. Until recently, All Right was one of Knoxville's two biggest parking-management systems. But just last week, All Right merged with its biggest local competitor, Central Parking Systems, which was already in charge of over 7,000 spaces. About the merger, Shelton says, "I don't think you can say it will increase rates." Although one consequence of the merger is that Central/All Right will have to give up a total of about 536 spaces—most of them in the Hilton garage on Clinch—to other operators, the new parking giant will still run well over 11,000 paid spaces. Any motive for Central to undercut their dwindling rivals with lower rates might now seem less urgent. A captive market and little competition looks like clear weather for the newly merged company.

Some guess that rates in this once-humble part of Gay Street might approach those common in the vicinity of Plaza Tower—i.e., $65/month. Other businesses, including Kimball's neighbor, wholesaler H.T. Hackney, have hinted darkly that they'll leave downtown if the Justice Center crowds them out of their habitual parking places.

When most of the Justice Center-area parking will serve a guaranteed demand, retailers that serve a voluntary customer base—those who can shop elsewhere for jewelry, roast-beef sandwiches, or microbrewed beer—may well come up short.

Overbey suggests that the city's efforts to get a grip on parking haven't gone far enough. He observes the Superchamber's park-and-ride shuttle service won't work for everybody. "There are some folks who need their cars during the day." He'd like to see the city take a stronger hand in establishing parking policies.

Ask a suburbanite why they don't come downtown more often, and they'll likely mention the word parking. Exactly what they mean is a little more elusive. The availability of parking downtown is markedly evident in a map produced by the UT-sponsored Urban Design Studio; at least half the acreage of downtown appears to be paved for parking already. Few could complain of a lack of total supply. The last comprehensive study of the matter—a 1990 study commissioned by the MPC—found that downtown Knoxville, in fact, already had 2,700 more parking spaces than would be expected in an otherwise comparable urban area. A follow-up study in 1995 reaffirmed that parking supply was still well ahead of demand. At every time of day, parking is always readily available.

Downtown parking has been described as a "problem" since at least 1929, when an urban study cited the chaos of cars badly parked in the streets and on the sidewalks. But in those MPC studies, the phrase parking problem is in quotations marks.

Public parking is handy throughout most of downtown, though the closer you get to the original center of town—the intersection of Gay and Main—the more expensive it is. Still, it's an unusual day when there aren't short- and long-term places available within two blocks of Gay Street for under $2.

Much of downtown's chronic "parking problem" has to do with perception. Marleen Davis, dean of UT's College of Architecture, has become well known for her two maps drawn to scale that make a less-than-obvious point: West Town Mall (including its enormous parking lot) and the whole of downtown Knoxville are about the same size. Chances are, a mall shopper is almost certain to have to walk much farther between car and destination at West Town than she would have downtown. Yet, if you stop her and ask why she doesn't shop downtown, she'll likely mention something about convenient parking.

Mike Edwards attributes the paradox to two factors. "There's a line-of-sight phenomenon," he says. If you can see your destination, it doesn't seem as far away as it does if it's down the sidewalk and around the corner. Secondly, he says, suburban parking seems free, even if it's not. "At West Town, while you are paying for that parking, it's a hidden cost," Edwards explains. The mall has to pay maintenance and property taxes for several acres of real estate, and passes these costs on to the merchants, who hand them off to the customers. "When you go to the movie, you pay for your parking in the price of popcorn."

Even for those passably familiar with downtown, the decision alone can be nightmarish. Two parking garages charge $8 a day—but just around the corner, scarcely two blocks away, are parallel-parking spots for only about 75 cents a day. Then again, it's after 9 a.m., so you know there's about a 65 percent chance they're all taken. Still, there's that chance, and it might be worth the try. And you know that over on Henley, there are probably still spaces for $1.50. But then again, to use them you'd have to cross Henley, the least pedestrian-friendly street this side of I-40. Come to think of it, that lot in the Old City has spaces for just $1.25. And what's the deal with those places where you leave your car with an attendant who actually gets into your car and drives it somewhere? And those places that don't have an attendant—are they safe? There are dozens of other choices, of course, all at different distances from your destination, and maybe you don't mind paying $2 or $4 or $6 to park for the same period of time. You just don't want to pay that and then find out you could have paid less and used the difference to buy a sandwich at the Lunchbox.

Those 1990 and 1995 MPC reports did acknowledge that while downtown parking was plentiful, it wasn't necessarily "convenient."

Part of Mike Edwards' job is to build convenient parking garages, but he often wishes he didn't have to. He believes some parking problems might be solved not with more parking garages, but by reintroducing Knoxvillians to their own sidewalks. In many other communities, Edwards has observed, workers daily walk six blocks from their parking lots to corporate offices. The common assumption is that Knoxville workers are not as tolerant of a walk. Edwards thinks he knows why.

"People walk when it's not a chore, psychologically," Edwards says. If the passage from the parking garage to the destination is lively and attractive, people don't mind the stroll. "If you're in Manhattan, you walk 20 blocks without thinking about it. It seems like time doesn't exist, because it's so interesting."

That kind of phenomenon isn't out of the question here in Knoxville, Edwards says. When we're able to liven up our streets, we'll be much freer to place parking garages in any of several underused, peripheral areas.

"If Knoxville is a changed place, 20 years from now, our mental attitude toward walking may change as well. If Knoxville becomes a whiz-bang place to visit, people may say, 'I don't mind walking—it's fun!'"

Knoxville's two biggest projects happened to arrive in a time when Knoxville's not yet that sort of a place. So Edwards, the pragmatist, will put their parking garages as close as possible to the justice and convention centers.

It becomes a chicken-and-egg thing. Parking that's more convenient and less expensive may help some downtown retail. However, razing buildings to add oversized or characterless parking garages can undermine the appeal downtown had to begin with, making it less walkable. A misstep could squash both the chicken and the egg.

Parking garages themselves can make a place seem sterile and forbidding, especially to pedestrians. That's one of several reasons why the proposed Clinch Avenue parking garage, planned to serve both UT's Conference Center and the Convention Center, is a delicate balancing act. A report by out-of-town consultants from the Urban Land Institute emphasized the importance of the retail, restaurant, and entertainment potentials of Market Square to the success of the Convention Center.

This site is directly between those two sites. Clinch Avenue already has a concrete parking garage on its south side. Building another standard parking garage on the north side of Clinch would render this block a sterile canyon of parking garages, hardly the best introduction to just-off-the-footbridge conventioneers. If the block of Clinch that greets visitors who cross the pedestrian bridge is only a concrete alley with nothing to address the pedestrian, the conventioneer may not make it all the way to Market Square. Without seeing a street that looks inviting enough to explore, visitors may turn around and go back to their hotel rooms, spend their big Knoxville weekend watching cable TV.

Part of the solution may have to do with a lesson we could learn from the parking garage slated to be demolished. Many were surprised to hear there was ever a 255-space parking garage there to begin with, and that in itself seems significant. Built around 1925, before we'd lowered our esthetic standards for parking garages, it doesn't look like a parking garage. And it's not just a parking garage. Most of its street frontage is devoted to independent retail.

Edwards cites that example and the old Pryor-Brown garage at Church and Market, which houses businesses at its sidewalk level. Once a standard and obvious way to build a parking garage, examples of such hybrid buildings have been more scarce after World War II. Recently, though, they've come back into vogue in some cities, such as in revitalized Chattanooga, the movie-theater-that's-really-a-parking-garage.

Edwards would like to try something old-fashioned with this new building—build not just a standard concrete-slab garage, but one with architectural integrity and a street presence, including sidewalk-level retail space. Where the retail space would go—on Clinch, on Union, or both—is still under discussion. (The PBA is, in fact, considering a much more ambitious pedestrian route to Market Square that would swing well to the north.) But there seems to be a will to make this parking garage different from anything we've seen lately.

Building a large parking garage here has been opposed by the businesses it will displace, as well as by the residents of the Pembroke, the upscale apartment building on Union. Residents say a tall parking garage here will spoil their views. Edwards has won over several opponents with his mixed-use plan.

Mark Schimmenti, a downtown resident and leader of UT's Urban Design Studio, initially opposed the plan. In his lectures at UT and even at the American Academy in Italy, Schimmenti had used slides of this very block of Clinch as a perfect contrast between a well-designed garage with one that adds nothing to the street; the PBA's plan calls for tearing down his well-designed garage. No longer opposed to the project, he's now on a committee to help with the design. Once frustrated with other characterless buildings at the Locust Avenue corners of Clinch and Union, Schimmenti now says a well-designed parking garage could even improve the appearance of this block and make for a much better pedestrian gateway to downtown Knoxville. He calls this project a "watershed" for Knoxville.

Some still oppose the garage, insisting it could be better sited elsewhere, especially in underused areas a block or two to the north. Edwards defends the location as necessary to both the Convention Center and to UT's Conference Center, whose own parking is being displaced by the Convention Center project. Siting parking downtown is very much like one of those sliding number games—to move this here, you have to move that there—except that in this game, some of the numbers are planted permanently at their spot on the board. "When you're looking for a place to put a parking garage," Edwards says, "you can forget the Episcopal Church. You're not gonna tear that down. Forget Market Square, forget Krutch Park. Our greatest strength is our greatest challenge."

But some of the apparently non-sacred land is important to the city's longer-range plans. The old Watson's lot, for example, is two blocks farther from UT and the Convention Center, and it's being saved for another, 1,000-space parking garage.

"One of our most pivotal garages will be the 'Watson's' garage," Edwards says. (A year after the old department store closed, its parking lot still goes by that name.) "It's pivotal not for the Convention Center, but to support retail in the Market Square area." If they were to place the current convention center/conference center parking garage at Watson's, he says, "we would have shot ourselves in the foot twice."

The parking business is rife with paradox. Convenient parking in itself can be a liability. Traditionally, small downtown businesses have depended on walk-by traffic, especially restaurants and the sort of boutiques that depend on impulse shoppers. Elderly merchants recall how crowded the Knoxville sidewalks were in the '30s, '40s, and '50s. They say they miss the liveliness on the streets before 1970 or so, and say it was good for business. The assumption is always that "people don't come downtown anymore."

But people do come downtown in 1999—over 15,000 of them each working day, in fact. That's plenty to crowd several sidewalks. If we don't see them, it's at least partly due to the fact that their parking places are much more convenient to their workplaces than they were in the '50s. They're not walking on the sidewalks because they don't have to walk.

The opportunity to park your car in the same building where you work was rare before 1970. But in 1999, perhaps half of all Knoxville's downtown commuters park underneath or immediately next to their building. Thousands of them never even have to step outside. It's convenient for those who forgot their umbrellas—but the merchants miss their unplanned visits.

Convenience, it turns out, does not necessarily make for a lively city. In general, the more people walk, the more lively and economically vital a downtown is. For that reason, some modern urban planners in other cities have proposed placing new parking garages on the periphery of the urban core—not only to keep from having to tear down handsome buildings in the center of town to make way for concrete garages, but to infuse life into the businesses located along the way.

Mike Edwards admits that a long walk from a parking lot can indeed be a good thing for a downtown, especially "if your destination is a place you've got to go, whether you like it or not—like court." (The Justice Center parking garage, he says, isn't making room for many non-employees.)

Edwards adds, though, that "It's not a good thing when you have to walk four blocks from the grocery store to your parking lot." If convenient parking weren't made available for some kinds of businesses, shoppers might save those trips for the suburbs.

When it comes to parking, what's deemed to be good for one downtown business is not necessarily good for downtown business in general. Edwards says across the nation, many downtown planners are hogtied by corporations that insist on adjacent parking; if they don't get it they and their tax dollars are off for the suburbs. "What we're seeing is people building their corporations at suburban sites in order to have free and convenient parking. If their first priority is free, close parking, they're going to look at a suburban site."

He adds that even lenders are now skeptical about funding projects without plans for adjacent parking—even though during downtown's healthier days, adjacent parking was unusual.

The self-interests of some government entities are identical to corporate thinking. Sheriff Tim Hutchinson, for example, has insisted that all his employees be able to park immediately adjacent to their department's new offices in the Justice Center.

A more usual suspect in the decline of downtown retail, of course, is the cost of parking. Unfortunately for retailers and shoppers, the short-term parking that shoppers and clients depend on is the most expensive. By far. Short-term rates are typically four to five times as high, per hour, as all-day rates. And all-day rates may be more than twice as high as the monthly rates that office workers pay. So in any given hour, an office worker may pay less than a dime for every parking dollar paid by the shoppers who keep Kimball's or the Complex in business.

Leo Shelton of All Right/Central Parking defends the high price of short-term parking as important to make his own retail business profitable. Although they don't exactly lose money on their long-term customers, it's the short-term parkers "that parking operators need to generate income." Shelton defends parking prices in Knoxville as "relatively inexpensive," especially compared to Cincinnati, where he lived until moving here with All Right in 1992.

That kind of parking structure is not unusual, though some cities—Chattanooga and Asheville are two handy examples—have combated it by building publicly funded, self-sustaining parking garages with set rates that favor short-term parking which not only make parking more affordable, but more predictable, without leaving shoppers—who, after all, come downtown to shop for actual merchandise, not parking spaces—wondering whether they got a square deal.

The Superchamber has studied other ways to ease parking problems, several of them having to do with public transportation. Acknowledging that some people need to drive downtown every day, Central Business Improvement District director Pete Crowley suspects a large number of downtown workers don't. "The people who stay in their buildings all day, every day—do they really need to drive downtown?" he asks. For years, the city has offered regular free shuttle service to commuters who park at the Civic Coliseum at relatively inexpensive monthly rates. It's a logical solution; the huge garage, built for Civic Coliseum and Auditorium's entertainment functions, is rarely full except at night and on weekends. However, the park-and-ride program has never been as popular as hoped. For many, the shuttles aren't quite regular enough and the walk across the Church Avenue viaduct is a little too long and lonesome for them to feel comfortable with the program. Crowley understands some of the complaints. "If you've gotta wait at the Coliseum for 15 minutes, that's not acceptable." (For the record, most waits during high-traffic times—before 9 a.m. and after 4 p.m.—should be less than seven minutes.)

He says the program has grown in popularity since '97, but the numbers—about 200 round-trip riders per working day—are still modest compared to the thousands of automobile commuters who jam downtown every day.

Working with KAT bus lines, the Superchamber is currently offering special park-and-ride deals, applying the Coliseum shuttle deal to parking lots as far away as Cedar Bluff. "A lot of people don't realize what a good deal it is," Crowley says. "For the next few months, it's free."

A comprehensive parking and traffic study concerning both the Center projects is due within days; it's clear we can expect more surprising plans to come from public and private drawing boards in the months to come. It may be too much to expect that we'll someday remember 1999 as the Year We Figured Out the Parking Thing, but at least there seem to be some good minds on the case, and some uncommonly interesting ideas.

To judge by the amount of real estate we devote to parking throughout Knox County, and the amount of money we devote to it downtown, you might gather that parking is the single most important thing in our mortal lives. Maybe it's about time we gave it some thought as well.