It’s time to put the brakes on uptown parking

“We will look to people first. The days of designing for cars are behind us ”.

That’s Michael Smith, CEO of Charlotte Center City Partners. He’s speaking at the June meeting of City Council’s Transportation, Planning and Environment committee on the status of the Center City 2040 Vision Plan — a process that began about a year ago. But as committee chair Julie Eiselt reminded her guest, the vast majority of vehicle trips to Uptown don’t end on the street: they end in parking structures.

Eiselt was hinting at a much bigger idea: Aggregate investments in Uptown parking, including some publicly subsidized structures, are no longer a “growth” or “economic development” asset. They are an encumbrance.

Charlotte Center City Partners’ latest annual report tallies 48,000 privately managed pay-to-park spaces, mostly in multi-story decks. Add another 11,000 additional spaces for private residential and city-managed curbside meters. That approximates 20,060,000 square feet - an astonishing sum - approximating the total leasable space of 16 Bank of America headquarters buildings.

Uptown parking decks keep getting larger. Much larger. Older decks with 1,000-1,200 spaces pale when compared to the recently completed 720 S. Church mega-deck. It takes the grand prize at 11 stories and 3,200 parking spaces. That’s tops a million square feet, about the same floor area as the adjoining 33-story Bank of America office tower.

And Imaginon? It’s right next to the 7th street LYNX platform and still merits its own - get this - underground garage.

Do such massive investments make any rational sense?

Every time a deck is built, essential land uses are sacrificed and the street life of Uptown ticks down a notch. Developers are caught in the bind of passing these added construction costs onto their tenants, making it harder to build affordable housing and other essential uses. Or developers shave costs by hacking away at a project’s overall design features.

Everyone knows that parking means more carbon emissions. A recent letter of concern from the Charlotte Mecklenburg Climate Leaders to civic leaders stressed the need for parking constraints in compliance with Governor Cooper’s Executive Order 80, the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, and Charlotte’s own Strategic Energy Action Plan (SEAP).

Why are so many parking structures being built? Much of the problem lies with zoning regulations. Uptown is subject to UMUD zoning, short-hand for “Uptown Mixed Use Development.” But UMUD’s open-ended nomenclature allows a commercial building and its adjoining deck to qualify as a “mixed use.” What kind of “mixture” is that?

Unlike properties elsewhere near the Blue Line, where a cap on parking is enforced by code, UMUD allows developers to build as much parking as they want. A case in point are the 6,000 spaces recently built or under construction within easy walking distance to the Stonewall Street LYNX station.

Traffic planning in Uptown has always been based on the premise of mitigating congestion — namely that it’s o.k. to build more multi-story decks, as long as the rush hour traffic load doesn’t congest the feeder streets. The pause generated by COVID-19 affords a fitting opportunity to substitute a new premise based on the concept of “sustainable mobility”: where bus and light rail, walking, bikes and scooters, carpooling, Uber and Lyft, even autonomous travel, lessen the burden of traffic congestion.

It’s time to consider converting temporary place-making experiments like the Black Lives Matter mural into permanent public gathering places. While we’re at it, why not convert North and South Tryon to a pedestrian dominant mall that could connect a future 11th Street Silver Line station site to the attractions of the Levine cultural campus ?

Targets and timetables are needed to reset the travel mode-share. The pre-pandemic level of commuter automobile trips to Uptown hovered at 70%. It needs to be lowered to 50% or less. This recalibration should also address the prospect of a huge swing to tele-commuting that will likely outlast the Covid-19 pandemic.

Remedial zoning actions should also be advanced. They would include holding the parking inventory at 2020 levels within a prescribed distance from the Blue Line. The zoning map in those areas could be upgraded to a unique “Uptown Urban Sustainable (UUS)” category in the forthcoming Unified Development Ordinance zoning code.

Vision plans often fail because they can’t be enforced. That’s why City Council must lead by championing effective policies and regulations that discourage, disincentivize and diminish parking in Uptown.