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Downtown’s greatest need: free parking?

by Jack Neely

It’s all over the news: parking downtown is impossible and getting worse. A prominent TV reporter recently mentioned the “major problem” of downtown parking. An article in the daily referred matter-of-factly to downtown’s “parking nightmare.” A local folksinger has a song about “a town without parking.” The parking nightmare is a matter of devout belief. Businesses cite it every time they close their doors. It was that parking nightmare, they say. Couldn’t have been anything else.

Maybe I’m weird. Honest people have told me so. But I’ve been driving downtown for 25 years now. Except for one night during a Christmas parade a couple of years ago, I have never had much trouble finding a place to park in downtown Knoxville. I’ve rarely paid as much as $2 for the privilege.

For most downtowns in America, that’s cheap as dirt. If people are complaining two bucks is too much, maybe parking’s not our main problem here.

Any time people start talking about free parking, we first need to acknowledge the obvious: there ain’t no such thing. When somebody supplies a 150-square-foot space of asphalted prime real estate on which random strangers can leave, for an indefinite period, a machine that weighs 2,000 to 7,000 pounds and may or may not be leaking corrosive fluids, you can bet somebody’s paying something.

When you park for free in a shopping center, of course, you’re a guest of a private business; one of the conditions of your stay is that you’ll do some shopping. Part of what you buy at that shopping center will go toward maintaining the parking lot, keeping it paved, cleaning it up, paying property taxes for it, often paying a security guard to keep an eye on it.

It’s not surprising that if the proprietors find out you’re parking there without performing your duty as a consumer, you’ll be towed. That happened last year to some Knoxvillians attending a political demonstration who left their cars at a “free” West Knoxville parking lot. A security guard observed that they weren’t shopping. He called the tow trucks.

Downtown, there’s no assumption that you’re anybody’s customer; nobody’s going to tow you for using the space for purposes of your own. Downtown, you might be going to have lunch or shop, but you might also be going to the courthouse, to the bank, to work at the office, to the Y, to the museum, to the library; to hear a speech, meet a friend, carry a sign, or take a jog. There’s no way to take a percentage of that. Downtown, parking’s not free; but once you pay for it, you are.

Of course, if downtown parking were “free,” it wouldn’t be free, really; we’d just pay for it differently. We’d pay for it once a year, when we pay our taxes. Would that be better?

Still, paying to park bothers folks. Some say it’s the principle of the thing. I’d rather drive 10 miles than pay a dime for parking. For years, that’s been a favorite slogan hereabouts. As a personal motto it has a bold ring to it. I’m just not completely sure what it means. Maybe it’s our own personal foreign-aid policy. After all, the OPEC nations do need our money. Somebody’s got to feed the wives and concubines, and make payments on their famous golden bathtubs. For struggling sheiks, that expense can be ruinous. Also, many of OPEC’s captains of industry are obliged to make contributions to their own charities, some of which, we’ve been learning lately, have pretty unusual agendas. Who’s going to help them pay for all that? It might as well be these defiant, independent-minded car drivers of Knoxville.

Otherwise, our hard-earned dollars might fall into the hands of Knoxville entrepreneurs. Or, worse, the public parking facilities administered by Knoxville’s elected officials. By God, we’re a proud people, and we won’t stand for that.

I’ll have to admit that in setting myself up as an experienced downtown parker, I’m cheating a little bit. I’m lucky to have days when I can ride the bus, or my bicycle, the five miles or so to work. But there are days, maybe 100 days a year, when weather, timing, or a far-flung schedule conspire against me, and I have to drive. When I do, I park at one of the 10-hour meters around town. It’s easy and cheap. An hour and 40 minutes, a leisurely lunch or shopping trip, is one quarter. You can leave your car there all day and into the night for about $1.15 in ashtray change. I’ve paid more per day in library fines.

Most of the spaces I use, along Central Street or Church Avenue, are only about a three-minute walk from Gay Street, another minute to Market Square. On my short stroll to work, I pass businesses that I hear are struggling with lack of parking, and threatening to move.

These 10-hour spaces are all over the place: in the Old City, on the Gay Street viaduct, about 300 in all, just in the core of downtown, not counting a couple dozen more over on the fair site.

You might assume that with rates like that, it’s a competitive game; it’s not. There are always empty 10-hour spots that go begging on the street, even during the prime business hours. Last Tuesday at lunchtime, I walked around and checked several of the cheap, all-day parallel-parking spaces within a brisk five-minute walk of Market Square. I found more than 100 of them plumb empty.

I’ve been told that Knoxvillians don’t like to walk a couple of blocks. I’ve also been told that some of these spaces involve ascending or descending hills, which is reportedly a struggle for some workers, due to certain wardrobe malfunctions. Many commuters are still fond of wearing high heels for walking purposes. They have a right to wear high heels, and may have respectable reasons to do so. I’d be the last one to try to dictate fashions. The problem, they say, is that it’s hard to wear high heels and, at the same time, walk downhill to the inexpensive parking.

Knoxville’s streets aren’t half as steep as some well-walked hills in San Francisco. Obviously, San Franciscans don’t wear high heels. San Franciscan women, anyway.

When I hear people complain about parking downtown, I sometimes suspect they’re just trying to make conversation, and they’ve already said all they can about the weather. It’s one of those things people like to shake their heads about, like “Knoxville drivers” or “the government.” Surely there are some real parking dilemmas. Residents have specific parking issues that do need to be addressed. The elderly and the handicapped may have needs for convenient parking that the rest of us don’t. Pricing inducements, like city-operated garages with a standardized price for short-term visits might well help retailers. It would be interesting to see. But I’m not sure that’s the heart of the matter.

Retailers and restaurateurs depend not only on the reality of downtown parking, but the perception of it. If their would-be patrons tell them parking is a problem, for them it is a problem. A perceived lack of parking becomes a self-proving misconception. Retailers live by the credo that the customer is always right. But I’m free to say what retailers may know in their hearts, but can never say out loud: the customer is sometimes wrong. Moreover, the customer is sometimes also lazy. If I were a retailer, the concept that the customer is always right would be a struggle.

If parking is somehow a problem to the customer, one big part of the problem is that the cost of parking downtown is regularly, stubbornly, and grossly exaggerated. Every day somebody tells an impressive tall tale about how much they had to pay to park downtown. “I can’t pay six dollars to park to eat lunch.” I’ve heard that specific figure cited in West Knoxville from more than one erstwhile luncher. And it would be rude of me to respond that nobody downtown ever asks them to pay six dollars to park for a lunch hour. Even some local officials, by way of making a point, seem to enjoy exaggerating for effect.

Some parking lots do gouge customers—I don’t know why anybody ever pays as much as $5 a day, never mind $10, the stiffest price anywhere downtown—though that’s less than half the maximum in many American downtowns, and less than half what we Tennesseans pay in several lots on Vol game days. When people pay five bucks or more, I suspect it’s because they haven’t noticed the better rates.

It may well be that discrepancy, that fear of being taken advantage of—rather than fear of paying something—that is at the heart of Knoxville’s parking anxieties. An education, perhaps in the form of a helpful tri-fold guide to downtown parking rates, might help. Some people are willing to pay four or five dollars for the convenience of handy parking, and that’s their business. But many would probably choose not to. To make a living, parking-lot operators should not have to rely on the driver’s ignorance of better rates around the corner.

It’s the high rates many see advertised first. The signs advertising a dollar for half an hour in some surface lots must be as dizzying to suburbanites as the signs “Topless” or “Two-drink minimum” are for a country Baptist in New Orleans.

Sure, it can be alarming on a first visit downtown, and some rates are rising. Several months ago, the county thought it would make interim use of its woebegone State Street site by paving it, at considerable public expense, as surface parking, and get into this high-rate action, by charging $2 an hour, $5 a day, $3 if you get there before 9 a.m. The lot comprises hundreds of spaces one block from Gay Street, and it has not, to my knowledge, ever been as much as one quarter full.

The assumption has always been The more parking the better, but there’s a question of whether easy parking is even a good thing. Parking adjacent to a destination is not usually considered to be ideal urban design.

If every business or law office whose customers wanted free parking provided free parking, downtown would have to spread out. Kingston Pike, Cedar Bluff, and Clinton Highway look like they do because free, convenient parking is their dominant principle. Free parking for everybody would transform the CBID into a confederacy of strip malls, and downtown would look like everywhere else. Explaining why it would be worth any extra trouble would be difficult. You’d need a GPS device to locate it.

Retailers’ second complaint, after the one about no free parking by the store, is that there’s not enough pedestrian traffic downtown. They’re nostalgic for the days when there was such a stream of pedestrians on Gay Street that you had to stand in a doorway and look for your opportunity to jump into the prevailing current. Pedestrian traffic gave retailers from sandwich-makers to florists a chance to nab the impulse shopper, who was often a big part of the daily till. It’s still like that in some cities. And in cities like that, retail thrives.

Not in Knoxville. Every day, an estimated 20,000 people come to work downtown. However, except at certain times of day and on special occasions, pedestrian traffic is too light to count on for retail purposes. I hope Market Square is becoming an exception. But it’s worth trying to remember where, in those golden days of heavy foot traffic, people were walking to, and from.

If parking were convenient and free, why would there be anyone on the sidewalk at all? Where would they be going?

“It looks like a city,” a visiting Northerner told me a few years ago. “But where are all the people?” I explained to him that in Knoxville you don’t see people much, because in Knoxville people like to park very, very close to their destinations. Some don’t even have to step outside. More recently, someone asked me if a certain venerable downtown church had gone out of business, because they rarely saw people walking into or out of the building. No, I said, it was just that they built a new parking garage adjacent to the church. It became a contained system, like the Biosphere.

We weren’t always so spooked about parking and walking. When I was a kid in the ‘60s, we came downtown in the car a lot. If we were going to a show at the Tennessee, my folks would hand their keys to a parking attendant on Church or Clinch. It sometimes alarmed me to see my dad leave our car with a stranger and get only a cardboard ticket in return. I came to understand that this was how grownup Knoxvillians parked their cars. It came to seem rather sophisticated. Then we’d walk three or four blocks to the theater. Sometimes we’d see somebody we knew on the way. The walk was no big deal.

Now, for some reason, it is. The demand for parking adjacent to one’s downtown destination is a fairly recent one, but one that architects hastened to meet with large parking garages on the same plot as the office building it was designated to serve. That began happening around 1970; in the three decades that followed, streetfront retail shriveled. Of course, we’ve always blamed it on West Town. But there are still 20,000 people working downtown, enough to support significant retail on a daily basis. If only we could ever scare them out of their offices.

Convenient parking may even be bad for our health. Lately, New Yorkers have enjoyed annoying Southerners by bragging that they’re thinner, in better shape. What’s even more annoying is that a walk around Manhattan that seems to prove they’re right. Obese New Yorkers are even rarer than humble New Yorkers. Is it because they’re more moral, and live cleaner than we do? I know a few New Yorkers, and I’m skeptical of that prospect. Are they eating healthier? Maybe, but most food trends these days, good and bad, seem to go national pretty quick.

It seems likely to me that New Yorkers owe much of their serendipitous health to the fact that their parking is so horrible. New Yorkers exercise every day, and they never miss a workout due to personal conflicts or failure of will or general torpor. They have to exercise daily. They get a good workout, in large part, because in New York parking a car anywhere is always expensive and sometimes impossible.

Scientists have begun making connections between urban sprawl and waistline sprawl. Here’s my own hypothesis, as yet untested: there is a direct inverse correlation between a city’s parking rates and that city’s rate of obesity. I bet we’ll see the study in USA Today by the end of the decade.

Maybe if we made parking tougher than it is, we’d all walk more, lose weight, and in the long run we’d have to pay less in taxes for TennCare, and maybe even lower health-insurance rates.

Are Knoxvillians themselves the main problem? Is this a city full of folks who can’t bear the thought of shelling out a buck or two—or of walking a couple of blocks? And if we are a city like that, do we deserve a real downtown?

It’s a strictly rhetorical question, because we’re not a city like that. Many Knoxvillians aren’t parking-phobes. People do come downtown. They come downtown by the thousands, every single day to work. They come by the thousands on Thursday nights to hear live music. Sometimes they come downtown by the tens of thousands, as they have done at a couple of very successful festivals this year.

There are already more parking places downtown, per acre, than in any other neighborhood in East Tennessee. Downtown has almost three times as many parking places as a development of comparable acreage called West Town Mall. Is this mainly a matter of too much demand?

If people find a way to add more parking downtown, I won’t get in the way. But when people talk about downtown not working because there’s no place to park, I’m tempted to paraphrase Yogi Berra. The great catcher and intuitive malapropist once offered his damning assessment of a once-favored restaurant. “Nobody goes there anymore,” he said. “It’s too crowded.”

June 24, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 26 © 2004 Metro Pulse