Development at 203 S Greensboro Needs Less Parking, More Startup Space to Complement Library

On September 19, the Carrboro Board of Aldermen will be discussing a proposal to redevelop 203 S. Greensboro St into the Southern Orange County library and several other public uses for Town of Carrboro departments.The current plan significantly over-provides parking and under-supplies useful commercial space in a downtown whose own recent parking study found that there are over 1,280 unused parking spaces in downtown Carrboro (click here, see page 9 of PDF) at virtually all times of day, 365 days a year.

Before moving forward with this plan, the Board of Aldermen should modify the project as follows:

  1. Reduce the overall parking program to 150 spaces, using only the below ground and 1st levels for parking.
  2. Add a minimum of 8,400 square feet to the project on the upper floors that would be leased to private, taxpaying uses
  3. Explore if building more sq footage brings cost per square foot down, especially if building full, flat floors across floors three and four
  4. Pursue a partnership with American Underground to fill some of the space with startups, and/or use a commercial broker to lease the space
  5. Allocate the 150 parking spaces as follows:
    1. 20 spaces for use by Town (all departments combined)
    2. 130 public spaces (can be used by library patrons, artscenter, town workers, etc as long as they follow parking rules)
  6. Price the parking in the deck to keep 15% of public spaces free at all times, adjusting the price by time of day according to demand. If the deck can have 15% of spaces free without charging at some time of day, parking should be free in that time period.

Why The Aldermen Should Take These Steps

Let’s unpack these moves one by one.

1. Reduce parking to 150 spaces. Here’s the ground floor of the proposed building. South Greensboro Street is to the left, Open Eye Cafe is be directly above the building.  The ground floor of our new signature Town building would be a 14,000-odd square foot library and 19,000 or so square feet of parking. As you go up, the pattern remains this way- about 33,000 sq feet of development of which 58% is parking and 42% is everything else. The below ground floor is 80% parking. This is just too much. If you look at the total program proposed, it comes out to 5.4 spaces per 1000 gross square feet (GSF) of building. To put this in perspective, malls and big box stores generally provide 4 spaces per 1000 GSF.  After the administration in Washington signaled its intent to pull out of the Paris Climate accords, Carrboro put green lights up on Town Hall to signal its commitment to climate action. If we are going to build more parking for our public buildings than Southpoint Mall builds for its shoppers, then I would suggest we take those green lights down and stop pretending we’re committed to fighting climate change. A lot of communities don’t even have parking requirements downtown anymore (i.e. Durham) because they are working to help people use more sustainable travel modes by not subsidizing auto usage.

Library Parking Ground Floor

14,390 square ft of Library, 19,000 square feet of parking!

2. If we took out two levels of the parking deck, according to the cost per square foot and cost per space of parking for the Town in the June 20th presentation, we could add 8,400 square feet of space and pay the same amount to build the building as if we built 55,000 square feet and two more levels of parking. However, we would have more space to lease that would hopefully bring a return on investment to the Town over the years.

3. The cost of this building is projected at $250 per square foot. I am not sure if this is high, but the irregular shape of each floor to wrap around the parking deck may be driving the cost up. The Board should seek advice from Jim Spencer, the architect, on whether having more conventional floor plates on the third and fourth floor in lieu of parking would bring the overall cost per square foot down. If so, then the Town could consider even more square footage that could be rented to the private sector.

4. Pursue a partnership with American Underground. For those who don’t know, American Underground is the wildly successful startup incubator in the basement of the American Tobacco Campus in Durham which has since expanded to two more buildings in Durham and one location in Raleigh. Now that Carrboro has direct bus connections to Durham with stop one block from 203 S Greensboro and one block from American Underground(AU), it’s a great time to leverage a lot of the common cultural affinity between Carrboro and Durham and see if AU is interested in establishing a “Western Outpost” for their ecosystem in Carrboro. We may be able to offer less costly expansion than the increasingly expensive office space market in Downtown Durham, while still offering many of the amenities that both downtowns share.

5. Allocate the 150 spaces as follows: 10 for town employees, 140 public spaces. The current proposal has 30 spaces for Parks and Rec. If the Town wants to get businesses in downtown Carrboro to get their employees to stop using up public parking that visitors and customers could use, they should lead by example. Last year, a delegation from Chapel Hill and Carrboro visited a very successful mixed use project in Boulder, Colorado that had multiple users using one parking garage called Boulder Junction.

Boulder Junction in Boulder, CO has its parking Shared, Managed, Unbundled and Paid

Boulder Junction’s parking operates on four principles: it is shared, managed, unbundled, and paid. “Shared” means that any person can use any space; there’s no “parking for XYZ business only” signage. “Managed” means that there is a strategy for how the parking is to be used, and an entity providing policy and enforcement to ensure the strategy is carried out. (in this case, the city of Boulder) “Unbundled” means that if you rent space in the building, you are not automatically allocated a parking space- you must also rent spaces individually as well, whether you rent by the hour, day, week, or month.  Finally, “paid” is relatively obvious. While the Carrboro Parking Study’s chief failure is no mention of the word pricing, the Town actually went ahead and priced the Rosemary Street lot by Carrburritos and Bowbarr recently, so we’ve crossed the Rubicon and now charge for parking in Carrboro. So let’s do it right. Let’s start where we are as a Town, and implement a system that lets the first 2 hours (or 3! or 4! or whatever we decide!) be free, and only thereafter charges the user. This system is deployed in the North Deck at the American Tobacco Campus in Durham, and people can pay using the Parkmobile app. It’s convenient, promotes turnover, prevents park and ride in inappropriate places, and allows for parking to be free as long as it makes sense.

Taking these four principles, a purist approach would put all 150 spaces into this system. But the Town has storage for some departments in the basement, and there are probably some needs for moving equipment in and out of the building for key events that should have those spaces reserved for town staff. But ten spaces should be enough.

Beyond those ten spaces, the Town should be encouraging downtown employees to park on fringe lots and either walking, biking, or busing to the core sites downtown (203 S Greensboro and the Century Center).

On page 20 of the parking study, you can see that VHB documented 151 cars parking for over 7 hours in our “2-hour stay” public lots. VHB estimates that 50 to 60 of these are town employees, and another 90 to 95 belonged to other downtown employees or UNC students stealth park-and-riding to campus.

I’m sure town employees who currently enjoying parking downtown may be disappointed with this recommendation. But hopefully they recognize that if they can park a little further away, they can support vitality for downtown businesses, and get a few more steps in to finish their commutes, or snag a CHT bus from a lot a little further away.

6. Price the deck for 85% occupancy. This is considered a best practice in the parking industry. If you set the price so that 15% of spaces are empty, then you can pretty much guarantee that with people coming and going, you will ALWAYS find a space at your destination. No more circling and hunting for a space. If demand for spaces is such that 15% of spaces are empty even if the price is free, then that’s what you charge – $0. Based on the Carrboro Parking Survey, it appears weekday lunch hours represent the greatest crunch given our current conditions. In this case, the parking at 203 S Greensboro might have a charge at lunchtime, but not earlier or later in the day. We’d have to set up the system and see. That said, once the system is up and running, businesses could opt in, just as they did in Asheville.

If you take these steps together, and only add the 8,400 square feet while reducing to 150 spaces, you still get a parking ratio of 2.4 spaces per 1000 square feet, which is higher than many downtowns like Carrboro require today. That’s a reasonable outcome to transition downtown away from auto dependence and towards greater economic vitality, while also delivering needed Town office space and the library everyone wants to see happen.

It’s time to do parking pricing right, on the Town’s terms, in a strategic way that balances our goals and puts us on a path to unlock the 1,280 spaces that are tied up in 140+ individual lots, while raising money for alternative modes. This worthy project is the place to start that new effort.

If you agree, please let the board know by emailing boa@townofcarrboro.org.

Carrboro Parking Study Needs Your Input Thursday Eve (Feb 11th)

If you care about having choices in how to get to and enjoy downtown Carrboro, it is very important that you attend the Carrboro Parking Study Kickoff Meeting at Carrboro Elementary school Thursday evening from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

I’ll be there to share a simple message, and I invite you to join me to reinforce it.  That message is:

"THIS STUDY WILL BE MOST SUCCESSFUL IF IT FOCUSES ON A BROAD GOAL OF IMPROVING ***ACCESS FOR PEOPLE*** TO DOWNTOWN CARRBORO, AND CONSIDERS PARKING ONE OF SEVERAL TOOLS TO REACH THAT GOAL."I apologize for going large font on everyone, but really, this is the heart of the matter. People love downtown Carrboro because it is full of life, energy, commerce, culture, food, art, music, protest, you name it. And all of those great things come from PEOPLE. Some of them happen to come downtown in cars, but really, it’s the PEOPLE that make the magic. Cars don’t have wallets and shop in our stores. Cars don’t play in local bands in our venues. Cars don’t wait tables in our restaurants. PEOPLE do. The town staff, fortunately, seem to get this. From a 2013 staff memo sent to the Board of Aldermen:

In, Parking Evaluation, Evaluating Parking Problems, Solutions, Costs, and Benefits, a publication from the Victoria Transport Institute, the author notes, “A problem correctly defined is a problem half solved.” As the Board continues to refine its overall parking objective–from the continuum of creating a greater number of parking spaces, to encouraging more consumers to the downtown, to reducing the number of existing parking spaces, to removing automobiles from the downtown and thereby reducing the Town’s carbon footprint—it may become easier to frame potential policy changes and LUO text amendments.

Citizens need to encourage the Board of Aldermen to continue in this direction described in the staff memo. Here are a few strategic initiatives to consider that could move us in this direction.

  1. The People Who Drive Downtown Most Often (and Stay the Longest) Represent the Biggest Potential Pool of Parking Spaces to Free Up: Employees If we can identify what barriers keep downtown Carrboro employees from coming to downtown by means other than a car, and address those- we can get all those people to work and free up a lot of parking capacity downtown without adding a single new space. The most obvious example here is that we have 33 restaurants and bars downtown, and while most places finish serving dinner in the 9:30 – 10:30 pm range, the bus service back to most in-town neighborhoods has a final trip leaving downtown before 9 pm. Workers may be able to bus in, but needing to drive home also necessitates driving in, and taking a parking space for the entire dinner shift in downtown.
  2. Recognize That Not Every Access Strategy Needs to Be Used by Everyone In Order for Everyone to Experience Better Access The more people with cars who sometimes drive to downtown that we can help try walking or biking downtown, the more parking will be available for folks driving in from places where biking, walking, or using transit are not as easy. On some days, those people who can walk or bike may still drive, but working to make sure walking and bike access is assured for those within a closer distance makes it more likely that parking spaces are open for those coming from further away, or those not on a bus line.
  3. Consider the Power of Many Small Changes Let’s consider a downtown employer with 10 employees, all of whom drive to work every day. Generally speaking, that employer will have a much easier time getting all ten of them to find a way to only drive 4 out of 5 days instead of getting two of them to stop driving downtown altogether. Either approach still reduces this group of ten’s collective demand for downtown parking by 20 percent. I doubt that there is any single strategy that will solve the downtown access issue, but a host of strategies that all temper parking demand by 3% here and 6% there can cumulatively have a big impact.
  4. Identify the Ways That Parking Pricing Is Superior to Aggressive Towing, and Explain Those Benefits to Residents, Businesses, and Visitors If we charge for parking, and do it in a smart, technology-driven way, we get all of these benefits:
  • Gives visitors to downtown more choice in how long they shop
  • Costs taxpayers less to enforce than enforcing free 2-hour parking
  • Prevents all-day Park & Ride Parking to UNC in town lots
  • Makes it possible to find a lot with many open spaces online or by smartphone
  • Makes it more likely that visitors to downtown find a space easily
  • Reduces cruising for parking which leads to increased congestion and emissions downtown
  • Generates potential revenue for improvements that expand bicycle, pedestrian, and bus access to downtown
  • Helps generate revenue for businesses with parking when their business is closed

 

If you want more details about any of the benefits of Parking Performance Pricing, I wrote a detailed post here.

I hope you can attend the meeting Thursday evening- see you there!

Key Take-away From Summer Streets: It’s Time For Autumn Streets

Sunday, July 19th, from 8:00 am to 2:00 pm, Carrboro held its second “Summer Streets” (Herald Sun article) event, in which the block of Weaver St between Main St and North Greensboro St was opened to people and closed to cars. For the umpteenth time in the decade and a half I’ve lived here, the Town closed this portion of Weaver Street with no visible negative impacts to traffic or downtown in general.

As usual, people came out and enjoyed a calm public space, kids drew with chalk, and everyone generally had a grand time relaxing, even with 100-degree heat index temperatures.  People did yoga, hung out in folding chairs just talking, and one of our Aldermen even held “office hours” for the second time during such an event.

What does opening a street to people do for a town?  Stuff like this:

Kurt Stolka and his 3-year-old son walked around Weaver Street after playing a game of soccer in the street.

He said when there is traffic on Weaver Street, “I just can’t feel calm letting my kids play. You have to constantly keep an eye on them.”

But the Summer Streets program helps parents like him relax, he said.

Safe, Happy Kids Dancing on Yellow Lines

Carrboro Summer Streets: Safe, Happy Kids Dancing on Yellow Lines

Kurt is absolutely correct. I took the picture to the right at the 2012 Carrboro Music Festival. I was able to take this photo because I did not have to hold DC’s hand in a vise grip in downtown Carrboro to provide protection from the greatest danger to children, cars. Why is this so important? Sure, I can take DC to Wilson Park, Carrboro Elementary School, McDougle School, or MLK Park and take advantage of any of the stuff there in the same way, but none of those places have the amenities of downtown in terms of food, commerce, and culture.

Back in May, WCHL reported that the Town was only going to hold three Summer Streets events, and to end them at 2:00 pm each time. This was due to concerns from “…local business owners inside Carr Mill Mall who don’t love the idea. They worry the street closures will keep shoppers away from the mall.”

Given the people-attracting quality a street closure can provide, I was baffled by these concerns. Fortunately, the latest Herald-Sun article reports:

“…[Carrboro Economic Development Director Annette] Stone said that after last month’s event, she sent out an email to business owners. She said she didn’t receive any negative responses and several businesses expressed support for the program.

Seeing as there appears to be broad agreement that there’s not problem here, let’s not take any more half-measures in managing what could be one of our community’s marquee public spaces- let’s set up an “Autumn Streets” program that starts the first Sunday in September and runs EVERY SUNDAY until the Sunday before Thanksgiving, from 8:00 am to 9:00 or 10:00 pm.

That would be twelve glorious autumn days to come downtown and relax, and twelve other great opportunities to try ways to program the block to engage residents. There are plenty of tourism co-promotion opportunities between UNC football games, 2nd Friday Art Walks, etc to take advantage of as well to engage visitors.

If you think this is a good idea, please email the Carrboro Board of Aldermen and let them know “I support weekly Autumn Streets!”

Transit Tourism Opportunity on Sunday 9/28: Carrboro Music Festival!

Carrboro Music Festival

Carrboro Music Festival

Well, it’s decorative gourd season, friends, and the weather looks perfect this weekend, AND the Carrboro Music Festival is Sunday.  I expect to be over there by foot/bike/wagon or some combination thereof, but for Durhamites who feel like Carrboro is a long drive to hang out with 10,000 other music lovers taking in 180 local bands for free, then good news!  For the first time ever, you can take Triangle Transit to get you to the festival, as long as you’re willing to do a little walking.

Route 400 leaves Durham Station every hour from 7:00 am to 6:00 pm on Sundays now, and drops you off on Franklin St in Chapel Hill at the Varsity Theater.  Just walk due west down Franklin along maybe the nicest stretch of city street in NC, and you’ll arrive in the middle of all the music in about 15 minutes or so.

Buses head back to Durham from the Carolina Coffee Shop (directly across from the Varsity, where you got off) a little after the hour, with the final bus leaving at 6:12 pm.

Here’s a link to the Route 400 bus schedule.  Download the Transloc App (Iphone or Android) to track buses in real time and locate stops.

Music starts at 1:00 p.m. so you can easily catch 4-4.5 hours of music before needing to walk back to Chapel Hill to bus it home.  Have a great weekend!

Visiting Carrboro and Chapel Hill Without a Car Just Got A Lot Easier

Triangle Transit Buses

New regional bus service on weekends from Triangle Transit is making intercity and interstate travel to and from Chapel Hill/Carrboro without a car easier than it has ever been.

If you try to visit the Research Triangle region of North Carolina without driving your own car here, you will generally arrive by one of three methods:

  • By Plane – To RDU Airport, which is in between Raleigh and Durham, just north of the town of Morrisville
  • By Bus – To Durham Station in downtown Durham via Megabus; or to the Raleigh Greyhound station on Capital Blvd
  • By Train – To the Raleigh, Cary or Durham Amtrak Stations

None of these arrival points are in Chapel Hill or Carrboro, which means if you want to get to our neck of the woods, you need to then either use Triangle Transit’s regional bus service, rent a car, or take an expensive cab/UberX ride.

Before August 2014, Triangle Transit had offered service that stopped serving Chapel Hill around 6:45 pm on Saturdays, and there was no Sunday service at all.

Triangle Transit Expands Weekend Service August 2014

But as of August 18th, 2014 – these gaps in the regional bus schedule have been filled in!

Regional Saturday service now runs as late as the weekday service on routes 400 and 800, and Sunday service runs from 7 am to 7 pm.  What this means is that trips that were either impossible or forced a car rental for a weekend visit, can now, in most cases- be accomplished using Triangle Transit regional services, local buses, and walking in the urban core of Chapel Hill and Carrboro.  This will give travelers more options, and save them money.

Here’s a quick rundown of your options.

Downtown Durham and Bus 400 or 405 = best Ground Transport Access to Chapel Hill / Carrboro

Piedmont Arrives at Durham Amtrak Station

Piedmont Arrives at Durham Amtrak Station

Arriving by Amtrak in Durham, every train arrival of the entire week except for the last train from Charlotte (#76) on Sunday nights – allows for a successful connection on to Chapel Hill via Triangle Transit bus 400 or 405. Unfortunately, the earliest southbound train out of Durham leaves before the first bus from Chapel Hill each morning reaches Durham. Hopefully this connection will be added in the future.

However, the rest of the daily outbound train schedule in Durham is well served. Amtrak has direct connections from Durham to everywhere Amtrak’s Carolinian and Piedmont travel, including Charlotte, Greensboro, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC.

Also arriving in Durham, directly across Chapel Hill Street from the Amtrak Station at the corner of Willard and Chapel Hill, is the one stop for Megabus in the Triangle.  Megabus has direct service from Durham to Charlotte, Fayetteville, Richmond, and Washington, DC.

To get from either the Amtrak station or Megabus stop to Chapel Hill / Carrboro, walk to the bus center and connect via routes 400 and 405.  400 runs all day long, and 405, which is slightly faster, runs on the weekdays during rush hour.  You can find schedules for bus 400 and 405 here.

To be sure, you could also reach the Triangle by train in Raleigh or Cary, and by Greyhound bus in Raleigh as well.  That said, if you’re trying to get to Chapel Hill or Carrboro, your connection will be shorter and more convenient from Durham.  The only time this might not be true is if you arrive at the Raleigh Amtrak station by one of the trains that do not stop at Durham, such as the Silver Star, Silver Meteor, and the Palmetto.  If this is how you reach the Triangle, use the Trip Planner at www.gotriangle.org for the best way to continue on to Chapel Hill / Carrboro on Triangle Transit.

RDU Airport, Bus 100 and Connect to Bus 800 = best Air Transport Access to Chapel Hill / Carrboro

If you fly into RDU Airport, the bus that will pick you up, no matter whether you land at Terminal 1 or Terminal 2, is Triangle Transit bus 100.  Note that this bus follows the same traffic pattern through the airport whether it is going to Raleigh or to the Regional Transit Center (RTC).  When 100 arrives, assuming you’re headed for Chapel Hill or Carrboro, just confirm with the driver that you are boarding a 100 bus headed towards the RTC, and you’ll be on your way.  The RTC is quite close to the airport, and after departing Terminal 2, you’ll reach the RTC in just under 15 minutes.

Once at the RTC, you will find that every time bus 100 arrives, so do bus 700 (goes to Durham) and bus 800 (goes to Chapel Hill).  Board 800, and about 30 to 35 minutes later, you’ll be in Chapel Hill at the UNC Student Union.  If you’re headed to downtown Chapel Hill or Carrboro, it’s best to stay on to the first stop past the Morehead Bell Tower (can’t miss it), and then either walk up Columbia Street to Franklin, or if you’ve got heavy luggage, catch any Chapel Hill Transit bus with a name that doesn’t end in “X” at Sitterson Hall heading north to get to downtown, which is only 2 stops away.

Franklin and Columbia Streets – the Heart of Chapel Hill Transit

Now that you’re in downtown Chapel Hill, if you’re at the corner of Franklin and Columbia, you have easy access via Chapel Hill Transit to pretty much everywhere the bus system goes in either Chapel Hill or Carrboro.  The F, J, or CW bus will take you to downtown Carrboro in about 7-8 minutes.  The NS will take you to Southern Village or the north end of Chapel Hill.  The D or F can take you to eastern Chapel Hill.

Transit Information is Text and Smartphone-Ready in the Research Triangle

If you’re reading this for the first time, I can understand how this may all sound a little complicated.  That said, if you’re a visitor, there are lots of ways to get customer information about these and other bus services.  Perhaps the most useful are the Transloc and Transloc Rider apps in the usual smartphone stores.  They are free and integrate real-time arrival information for every bus and every bus stop in the Triangle.  You can see the system in action on the web as well at triangle.transloc.com  You can also call 919-485-RIDE to speak to customer service representatives who can provide trip planning assistance.

Fares

The base fare for Triangle Transit for a one-way trip is $2.25.  Chapel Hill Transit routes within Chapel Hill and Carrboro are free to everyone, so unless you’re planning to ride Triangle Transit multiple times in one day, paying for regional buses by trip with cash is the best, most cost-efficient way to pay.  More information on fares, including youth and senior discounts, can be found here.