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Downtown Parking

Parking sign picWhat is the cost of paid parking in downtown Davis?

Not how much will it cost an hour to park, but rather, what will the effect be on local businesses?

Local businesses are worried about paid parking and 50-plus of them have founded downtowndavis.org to bring their concerns to the City Council and the Davis public. Again, and again business owners state that paid parking will hurt their business.

Advocates for the paid parking plan state, “Let’s not forget that a car parking spot used for one car — and one shopper — can instead be used by six bikes, and six shoppers.” But, this depends on there being six cyclists demanding a new spot to park. Given the current availability of bike parking downtown I see no evidence that these new replacement shoppers exist. As far as I can tell, no one is deterred from biking downtown for a lack of a place to park. The same is not true for car drivers.

Without shoppers we will lose our downtown retail businesses.

Local retailers face stiff competition. Adjacent communities have retail with a wealth of free parking. Just look at Davis Ace’s competitors — Woodland Home Depot, the Dixon Ace, Target and Walmart. All have abundant free parking. Not to mention Amazon.com is available at every computer.

Parking fees don’t need to chase away all of a business’s customers to cause the business to fail. They just need to chase away a large enough percentage of customers to diminish profitability enough that the business owner cannot go on. That could be 15 percent. it could be 2 percent. So, the question is, are you ready to gamble with the livelihood of our local businesses?
What will downtown be like if a bad bet causes Davis’s retail business to fail?

Given those considerations, I want to hear from our local business people before moving forward with paid parking downtown. At least 50 of them don’t feel like they have been heard and have founded a new organization to make sure they are.

I suggest we all at least take their survey to start: http://downtowndavis.org/survey/.

Colin Walsh

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Comments

3 responses to “Downtown Parking”

  1. Greg Rowe

    When I go downtown to run errands and am only picking up small items, I ride my bike and carry a small backpack. On such trips I’ve never found any difficulty finding a bike rack for locking up my bike, even during the UCD school year. Picking up larger items (at Ace for example) usually requires driving and parking a car. From that perspective, I question the assumption that high parking fees would motivate people to bike or walk downtown. It’s sort of hard to bring a bag of bark or fertilizer home on a bike.
    On the other hand, the downtown plan consultant did a good job of documenting how the G Street garage is seldom full, even after 5:00 PM on a Friday evening. It was pointed out that many downtown employees could easily park in that garage rather than using the E and F Street lots, which would free up more parking spaces for shoppers. This just goes to show that this is an issue with many interesting aspects and no really easy solution.

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  2. Eileen Samitz

    Paid parking is just going to hurt sales for the downtown stores and reduce the sales tax that is needed by the City. I make frequent trips to Ace and the longer I am there and able to park for free, the more I purchase particularly in the gardening section and these purchases simply cannot be carried on a bicycle.
    I really hope that the City re-visits this issue and reverses the paid parking concept downtown. It is certain to hurt, not help the downtown businesses.

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  3. John Troidl

    It should be noted that, in reference to the original posting here on this topic, that Ace Hardware also has competition in nearby West Sacramento in the form of Target, Walmart, and Home Depot there….. ALL with free parking. Personally, I hate paid parking and have NEVER used the E Street Plaza parking since the meters went in. Not once. Don’t do it, Davis….. it only raises “the hassle factor” in what used to be a very friendly, low key town.

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