The SEPTA parking garage in Lansdale is seen from the northern exit of the garage facing south toward the Lansdale train station in 2020. Photo by Media News Group.
"If we want to continue to build and develop our charming town and Main Street, we must understand the negative impacts parking has, and that there is a cost to free parking."
(This is a Letter to the Editor submitted to North Penn Now. The views expressed are the author's own and are not representative of North Penn Now or Lansdale Borough.)
If you ask for ideas of how to improve the town you might get list of requested restaurants or hear about the tragic loss of the theater and bowling alley. But an always popular suggestion is to increase available parking and dismay about the loss of parking lots.
So, it might sound strange to hear that we have way too much parking, and it is preventing us from building the charming town that we all deserve and desire.
To understand the impact parking can have on an area, think about the area directly around the Lansdale Train Station and the Hillcrest Shopping Center. The train station has a mix of shops, restaurants, and other commercial business. Its also sometimes a challenge to park directly in front of your destination. Hillcrest also has a mix of shops, restaurants, and other commercial business. There is always parking available at Hillcrest. It is surrounded by an expansive parking lot.
Both locations are on Main Street in Lansdale. One is a vibrant place you can live and work or walk around and enjoy. The other is a quick stop on your drive to pick something up on your way to someplace else. Lansdale is a place, not a strip mall.
Density is destiny. We need a critical mass of residential and commercial property to build and support a thriving downtown. If more parking is added we have less room for destinations and each one gets pushed further away.
As the distance increases, it becomes harder to walk and driving becomes the norm. Then, we need more parking and we get more traffic. The alternative is we trade the excess parking for places we want to live and visit. In the exchange, we get more space for new restaurants and businesses. Housing becomes cheaper to build. And people get an incentive to walk.
Hillcrest didn’t do anything wrong; we have zoning requirements and ordinances that determine how much parking is required. It was built to conform to the those requirements.
The Train Station has the good fortune to be developed before these rules were put in place. To put things in financial perspective, the area around the train station is 300-600% more productive in terms of tax revenue per acre than Hillcrest. So not only is the train station more charming, it is a more efficient use of the land and more valuable to the town.
Lansdale recently completed a parking survey that found that at peak usage, 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., 31% of all spots were utilized. A typical target for this number is 70%. At 70%, spots are occupied, but people are not driving around and around the block to find parking.
At 31%, we are far below this target. At the same time, 15% of the SEPTA Garage spots were utilized. Meaning, we have a large number of spots available and a large number of them are in the exact same place. So when we hear that there is no parking available, what people are saying is there is no parking available directly in front of their destination.
And if you can’t walk a few blocks, I would be strongly in favor of converting a percentage of our parking to ADA.
Consider places that you enjoy spending time out and about, for example, dinner and a movie. Locally, I find Ambler and Phoenixville very charming, packed with restaurants, shops and activities. When Ambler hosts an event they say, “It's hard to park here, consider the train.”
Phoenixville has zero parking requirements for its Main Street and shuts the street to car traffic every weekend. Further away, consider Cape May or New York City. All these places are not great because it’s easy to park there. They are great despite the parking difficulty. And if we knocked down half of the building in exchange for more parking, they would all be worse off.
Finally, consider Lansdale at its most exciting. On First Fridays we shut Madison down, we trade parking for pedestrian space. The street and surrounding blocks are full of people walking, enjoying the atmosphere, maybe getting a drink or a bite to eat. Our businesses love it, and we talk about how to capture that energy on the following days.
Even with all of those people walking around, there are still spots open in the SEPTA parking garage.
The future of Lansdale that I imagine is of a vibrant and active town. A town where you can visit for the day, you grab lunch, maybe shop for a book or knickknack, see a show or activity that brought you, and end with drinks or dessert. You did have to park a few blocks away from your destination and after parking you did have to walk from place to place because it would be inconvenient to keep moving your car. But you enjoyed each part of the day and the streets were full of other people going about their days.
If we want to continue to build and develop our charming town and Main Street, we must understand the negative impacts parking has, and that there is a cost to free parking.
We should work to remove parking requirements from our towns zoning and ordinance requirements. And we should work together to build Lansdale the place.
Peter Worthington
Lansdale, PA
(Worthington is an appointed member of the Lansdale Borough Economic Development Committee.)
Letters to the Editor can be submitted for consideration to tony@accessgmt.com
