"You can't say, 'Too bad, you're going to have to walk,'" said Heidi Zimmer-Meyer, president of Rochester Downtown Development Corp. Whatever the reason, the city is not in a position to push people to man-up. It's tempting to jump on the healthy-living soapbox and badger those people into getting off their behinds like Richard Simmons.īut there are many reasons people don't want to walk, from laziness to safety concerns and time considerations to inclement weather. So, it would seem the real problem is that nobody's willing to walk a few blocks from his car to work. The study anticipated "hot spot" shortages in several areas by 2018, but that assumed 3-percent annual growth and development that never happened, namely Renaissance Square. During weekends, researchers might have found tumbleweed had they looked hard enough. Of those, 16,245 are off-street and available to the public, 1,637 are metered and 8,424 are in private lots.Ī 2008 city-commissioned study found that just 59 percent of those spaces were occupied during peak weekday parking hours. There are 26,306 parking spaces across the 70 blocks that make up downtown, including the East End and High Falls. ![]() When people traveling downtown complain about having no place to park, as they often do, what they're really saying is there's no place to park that costs next to nothing and is within a stone's throw of their destination. ![]() The announcement this week that City Hall wants public input to help formulate a strategic plan for the future of downtown parking was a tacit acknowledgment that Rochester has a parking problem.īut what is the problem? Is it a parking shortage or too much parking, as the Golden Crater title suggests? Or is it a little of both in that there isn't enough parking where demand is high and an over-abundance in less desirable pockets of downtown? Last year, Rochester prevailed over some of the most asphalt-scarred cities in America, muscling out Miami, Detroit and Kansas City before pummeling Jacksonville, Fla., in the final round. The dubious distinction is bestowed annually by Streetsblog, a website of daily transportation and land use news, to cities whose landscapes are pockmarked with hideous, slapdash expanses of parking lots. A little-known fact about Rochester that won't appear in any tourism brochure is that the city holds the Golden Crater award as the nation's reigning Parking Madness champion.
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