As If Parking Wasn't Bad Enough...

...now the powers that be are going to fine people for feeding the meter?

Kids, I'll be honest. I was going to make this a rant about how effing stupid the City Council is this town can be- and how our economic development policy- such as it is, seems to consist of drenching everything in gasoline and playing with a zippo lighter. But I've decided not to do this- I've decided to take a good, hard look at the arguments for an against this foolishness.

For: people should do their shit and move the eff along. That seems to be the general notion behind this- they want to try and free up short term meters on the street so that more people can get in and out and this, numerically speaking, I suppose would get more people into downtown Iowa City. Really and truly, the Court Street and Chauncey Swan Ramps are cheaper and really not that far from downtown when you think about it. People could actually, for a refreshing change of pace walk one to two blocks to their destination.

Or people could use mass transit. Iowa City does have a good bus system- if you really want to avoid the hassles of parking downtown (which are numerous) take a bus.

Against: Seriously? This is how we're going to scrape something out of what's left of downtown- by making it harder to park on the street? How has it come to this? A decade of gentrification has left downtown Iowa City essentially a smoking hole in the ground. No retail chains are going to want to move to a downtown where you have to pay for parking and where the rent is so astronomically high. No small businesses in their right minds would locate to downtown Iowa City for the same reason. Somehow, somewhere along the way the powers that be got this picture in their heads of a swanky, pricey downtown full of glass and steel condos and high end restaurants and thought it would be a good idea- but Iowa City has a shitload of restaurants downtown already and any Doctors here for the longterm will pick Walnut Ridge over Plaza Towers any day of the week.

So how do we square the circle? How do we begin to reverse a decade of foolishness? It won't be easy- it might take another decade or more, but we've got to seriously ask the question: what's going to bring people back downtown? Given a choice between driving to Coralville and parking for free or driving downtown and spending 20 minutes looking for a parking spot that you then have to pay for, people will pick Coralville every time. Free parking on weekends! Sure, you could argue that the City will lose revenue if they go that way- but if we can't bring people back downtown then the City will be losing revenue anyway because no one will be shopping in downtown Iowa City.

There's more to the story than just free parking on weekends though. We need more parking as well- and this is where the University comes in. Lot 11 is a massive waste of space. Take it, add one level to the whole damn thing and you've increased parking for University staff, students and employees in a big way. Add 2 levels and there's even more space. If you move the WRAC house, you can dynamite that festering turd of a parking ramp opposite the IMU and build a bigger one over there. (Which if they put a future Art Museum either in Halsey Hall or on top of it or some weird combination of both- thus putting the main entrance on the Anne Cleary Walkway, would benefit the IMU and any new UIMA that's built.)

We also need more bike racks downtown and bike lanes on Burlington. If we really want to encourage people to use alternative means of transportation, we've got to make room for cyclists on Burlington. To me, it's the biggest downside to biking downtown. Even with a helmet, pads and all the protection in the world, do you want to ride down Burlington?

Downtown has a myriad of problems that need to be addressed- but the basic question we need to be asking ourselves is a simple one: what's going to bring more people back downtown?

Making parking more inconvenient isn't going to do it.