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New parking garages may lure more visitors
Sunday, December 31, 2000 By Tom Barnes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
"We need to address the parking issue Downtown. Even today it's not a good situation, and it will just get worse if we're successful in bringing more activity in the city."
Pittsburgh parking czar Ralph Horgan hears a lot of griping about how hard it is to find a parking place Downtown.
But the director of the Pittsburgh Parking Authority sees that more as a good sign than a bad sign.
"Why is there such a demand for parking?" he asked. "Because people want to be Downtown. You don't have parking problems in areas where people don't want to be."
And yet he and his boss, Mayor Murphy, realize it's frustrating for motorists to go from garage to garage on weekday mornings after 10 a.m. and see nothing but red signs reading "full."
"Whenever I talk to people about coming Downtown to shop or to live, the first thing I normally hear is, 'Where do I park?'" Murphy said recently.
According to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette survey of 15 American cities for this Benchmarks report, Pittsburgh is near the low end in terms of Downtown parking, with just more than 21,000 in the Golden Triangle.
The only city below Pittsburgh was Tampa, Fla., with 19,000. Also near the bottom was Portland, Ore., with 30,523 spaces, and Cincinnati and Phoenix, each with about 32,000 spaces, and Denver with 36,000.
Well stocked with parking were Minneapolis, with 63,000 spaces, and Atlanta and Seattle, each with about 60,000 spaces in the central business district. San Diego and Milwaukee were close with 55,000.
Even though Pittsburgh had only 21,000 in its central business district, the number rose to more than 37,000 when nearby lots on the North Shore, Strip District, Mellon Arena and Station Square were included. The numbers are from the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership, a five-year-old booster group of merchants, property owners, institutions, city officials and Downtown residents.
Murphy has given Horgan a goal -- increase the supply of parking in the Golden Triangle and adjacent areas by 6,000 to 8,000 spaces over the next several years.
It's a daunting task, one made trickier by Pittsburgh's unique geography with hills and rivers and the compact size of the city's central business district. Downtown is easily walkable, which is good, but it's limited area makes it hard to find excess land for new garages.
Nonetheless, Horgan said he's begun to make progress. By April he expects to have added nearly 3,000 spaces -- in three newly constructed garages.
One just opened this fall-- a 650-space, privately owned facility that's part of Mellon Bank's new Client Service Center on Ross Street.
A second garage, to have 1,250 spaces, is being built by the Parking Authority on First Avenue, across from the new PNC Bank Firstside Center. It's due to open April 15. It will provide a net gain of only 750 spaces for Downtown because it's being built on what used to be a 500-car surface lot.
Because that garage will eventually be connected to a new Light Rail Transit stop on First Avenue, motorists will be able to park there and catch a free trolley ride into Downtown, Horgan said. The new T stop is expected to be completed by November.
Horgan expects the new garage to attract a lot of all-day parkers, that is, people who work Downtown. That should mean fewer "full" signs on garages in the central business district, freeing up more spaces for people coming Downtown to shop, eat or go to the dentist.
Help also is on the way on the North Side, just across the Roberto Clemente (Sixth Street) Bridge. A city-county agency called the Sports and Exhibition Authority is building a new 920-space garage on General Robinson Street, just half a block from PNC Park. It's also to be finished by the start of Pirates season in April.
However, when it comes to the subject of Downtown parking, two experts differ sharply with the conventional wisdom.
Paul Skoutelas, the Port Authority's chief executive officer, thinks the city would be better served by increasing parking lots in fringe areas such as the North Shore and Station Square and tying them to Downtown with Light Rail Transit.
"The automatic reaction of 'let's create more parking in the central core and reduce rates' is short-sighted," he said. "If you increase the supply of parking, you will encourage more people to come into town with their cars. It's not a smart approach.
"We have a compact central core with a difficult street network. For much of the day now, there's almost gridlock."
He said the Port Authority is increasing "park-and-ride" lots west, north, south and east of the city in hopes of getting drivers out of their cars and into mass transit.
The number of outlying "park- and-ride" spaces is now 7,500, which is up 60 percent from three years ago. Skoutelas plans to add another 2,500 in the corridor served by the recently opened West Busway.
Thinking along similar lines is Paul Flora, a regional planning consultant, former economist at PNC Bank and now adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
He argues that city government should ensure sufficient spaces for shoppers and people coming Downtown during the day on business -- for meetings, for lunch or to see a lawyer or a dentist.
But people who work Downtown don't have a right to expect low-cost, all-day parking near their office, Flora maintains. They should park in lots in the eastern, western, southern and northern suburbs and take a rail system into Downtown.
"If I were king, I would put light rail in each main direction -- Peters, Murrysville, McKnight Road and Greentree or the airport and take traffic off the roads," he said.
That would greatly ease the rush-hour congestion that clogs the parkways, I-79 and the Fort Pitt and Liberty tunnels each morning and afternoon, he said.
Flora disagreed with the Parking Authority's decision to build a 500-car garage beneath Lazarus, which opened in late 1998. He said it made more sense to build an underground walkway from the Wood Street station of the Light Rail Transit system through which transit riders could walk to get to Lazarus.
After 6 p.m. on weekdays and on weekends, Flora argued, parking Downtown should be free, to encourage more people to come. "That would give the city equal footing with the suburban malls," he said.
Of the 21,000 spaces in the Golden Triangle, the two biggest players are Alco Parking and the city Parking Authority.
Horgan's agency operates seven Downtown garages, with a total of 4,059 lined spaces. In addition, Horgan said, about 500 additional cars can be crowded in by using valets.
The recently opened 650-space Mellon garage on Ross Street is only about half filled, said Alco Parking President Merrill Stabile. Because it opened a few weeks ago, many people don't know about it, he contended; his firm runs the facility.
Besides garages, the Parking Authority has the 850-space wharf along the Mon River and the long, thin 767-space lot squeezed in between the parkway and Second Avenue, just east of the county jail.
And aside from the parking facilities operated by the city, there are privately owned lots in the Strip District (with 3,365 spaces), at Station Square (with 3,000 spaces) and around Mellon Arena (2,470 spaces.)
But where city officials will find other locations for additional garages or surface lots, in order to meet Murphy's goal of additional spaces, is anybody's guess.
Stabile says he's hopeful that another long-discussed facility might go forward in 2001 -- a garage of about 770 spaces that the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust would like to build on Seventh Street near Fort Duquesne Boulevard.
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