his is already how most downtowns are, and outside of the major cities they are... dying. Why would I drive at a crawl for half an hour to get to a store that only has a 25 percent chance of having any free parking spots? I'm just gonna go to the other location out in the suburbs, at the strip mall...
Exactly. This is how downtowns started to decline. Why would anyone go downtown when the suburbs have the exact same sort of thing? When department stores opened smaller branch stores, it turned out that people liked the branch stores; and even though the downtown store was larger, it had to contend with the less affluent customer base and the riff-raff that the suburban stores never had to deal with.
Even when urban renewal projects tried to bring people back, there was the same issue of "why would I go to Downtown Mall when there's the same sort of thing at Suburban Mall, but with free parking?" Sometimes planners tried to counteract these issues with upmarket, one-of-a-kind stores, but even those aren't going to work if the downtown is shit. New Orleans Centre, for example, was a three-level mall with Lord & Taylor and Macy's (the only stores of its kind in Louisiana and the only stores of that within a 300 mile radius) but still bombed because it was downtown New Orleans, not particularly convenient to the more tourist-oriented French Quarter, and wasn't a big enough draw anyway.
The best thing that a current-year downtown can ask for is one-of-a-kind year-round attraction that attracts people from not only the suburbs but the entire region, like Magnolia Market in Waco. Even though it vastly increased the demand for parking in downtown, it ended up promoting a number of pro-urban development, and ALL of this is captured on Street View.
1) Thanks to supply & demand, caused a nearby church with ample surface parking to start charging for parking
2) Expanding success of Markets created additional development of the facility (the gravel parking lot from 2017 is no more)
3) Promoted mass transit (the
Silo District Trolley ran successfully for almost four years before COVID)
4) Increased foot traffic meant that underused warehouses were remodeled into stores and restaurants, meanwhile, sidewalks and bike lanes were built.
5) Free parking is being slowly but surely pushed to the outskirts with transit and walking bringing people in.
The problem is these retards just think "muh cars" and want to banish them without giving a good reason, hoping to make up the difference by just plopping in a few hundred apartment units. The same applies
everywhere else. /r/fuckcars is a midwit board, but you see some people idolizing theme parks for their "car-free ideology". Again, though, if you look at Disneyland today there's a lot of transit connections, but starting off it was literally a giant theme park out in the sticks with a huge parking lot that was as big as the theme park itself. No monorails, no paid parking beyond a nominal 25-cent fee (which was around $2.50 in 2020 money). There is no all-day parking even close to $2.50 anymore near Disneyland, because over the years they built a whole system that commanded higher prices.
That being said, the answer is never as simple as "Build it and they will come" but they
never stop and consider "what would make high parking fees and transit into downtown
actually worth it?"
