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Source: St.迷你倉庫 Louis Post-DispatchAug. 17--ST. LOUIS --A kerfuffle over the current asphalt-covered state of the Cardinals' Ballpark Village development is raising an age-old question for downtown St. Louis.How much parking do we really need? How much is too much?The team's announcement earlier this month that it was opening 400 new surface parking spaces across much of the 10-acre site next to Busch Stadium was met with hoots of derision -- think "CarPark Village" -- from some city backers. One, Alderman Scott Ogilvie, charged that the heavily subsidized project on prime real estate should be held to a higher standard."We're trying to build a successful, vibrant downtown," Ogilvie said. "These things are not defined by how much surface parking they have. They're defined by people, by density, by walkable experiences."The team, though, pledges that the situation is temporary, that it still plans to build several dense, walkable blocks of condo and office buildings at Ballpark Village, just as soon as it can find some tenants. Until then, it'll get some use out of the long-empty ground, charging $20 a spot for game day parking and providing lots for the bars it's building in Ballpark Village's $100 million first phase."This serves a need for us immediately, and it's a vast improvement over what it replaced," said spokesman Ron Watermon. "We're thrilled to be able to offer fans additional parking. Parking is at a premium downtown."The whole episode highlights a long-running debate in downtown St. Louis, over how much space the city allocates for cars, how much for people, and how that should change.There are roughly 43,000 public spots in garages and surface lots downtown, according to the Partnership for Downtown St. Louis, though many condo and office buildings have their own private garages. In addition, there are nearly 3,300 street parking meters. All this in an area where perhaps 70,000 people work each day and about 13,500 live."Generally speaking, we've got more spaces than we need," said Bob Lewis, a principal at urban planning consulting firm Development Strategies. "It doesn't help to add more."And yet the perception, say downtown boosters and developers, is that parking can be a hassle downtown. It can be a barrier to entry, said Missy Kelley, spokeswoman for the Partnership."I get calls every single day from people coming in for a convention or a ball game and they want to know where to park," she said. "It's probably the No. 1 or 2 reason people call our office."The reality is quite different, said Gary Pohrer, chairman of St. Louis Parking, which owns or manages dozens of parking facilities downtown. He estimates that his lots average about two-thirds of their capacity on a typical weekday. And while that can swing widely if a big event is going on, he can't ever remember a day his lots were truly full."Everybody is always concerned about it," he said. "But we could have a Blues game, a Rams game and a Cardinals game and we'd still have space."PRESERVING STREET LIFEThat's not to say there's never a parking crunch. These days, Pohrer said, space is tight in the area around Market Street and Tucker Boulevard, where St. Louis University Law School just moved in and busy courthouses draw a lot of visitors. In the past, demand has been big in other spots. Much of it boils down to people's willingness to walk a short distance."People are just so used to being able to being a block away," he said. "But if you'll walk two or three blocks you can find something."That's what SLU is doing with its law school, which will bring 800 people downtown every day. Along with 135 spots in the building at 100 North Tucker Boulevard, the school is leasing 62 spots in lots across the street, and 350 spots a few blocks away in the Ninth Street Garage. Early on in the moving process, there were concerns about parking, said spokeswoman Jessica Ciccone. But they were quickly solved."I think people just panicked about parking," she said. "But we realized that it's 儲存uite agreeable to our situation, and it's worked out quite well."Other projects are building their own parking. The redevelopment of the old St. Louis Centre into a street-facing retail complex included converting much of the old mall's interior into a garage. And the Lawrence Group's rehab of the old Missouri Pacific Railroad tower into the Park Pacific apartments included a new seven-story garage alongside it.Those 580 new parking spaces right next door have been essential to making Park Pacific work, said Lawrence Group chief executive Steve Smith."I'd like to think we were downtown Chicago or New York and we don't need it, but the reality is parking is pretty darn critical for the success of a development here," he said. "New housing developments do need to have a viable parking solution to attract people who want to live there."Smith said he has no doubt that the big garage has helped the Park Pacific lease apartments faster, and he knows it helped fill office space, too. But, he notes, the street level of the garage is dedicated to retail storefronts, and that's a big difference from surface parking."We want to have an urban fabric. We don't want to have empty lots," he said. "The reason people want to be in an urban environment is for the street life."And that's the trouble with surface lots, critics say. They kill street life."When you create that much empty land and it's filled with cars or nothing, it looks like an urban desert," said Lewis. "It's a scary place, uninviting. So you avoid it."CARDINALS' PROMISEIdeally, a surface lot is a transitional use, a place holder between one building and another, said Don Roe, acting director of the city's planning and urban design agency. Sometimes that works out. Roe has got an aerial photo of downtown St. Louis from 1973, and nearly every block along the south side of Market Street is a surface parking lot. Today that sea of cars is gone, replaced by a row of office buildings and the Hilton at the Ballpark. Another full block of parking in that picture is now the Thomas F. Eagleton U.S. Courthouse. In all, 22 acres of parking in the photo has been replaced with buildings, said Roe."This is about evolution over time and improving the built environment," he said. "It's all an equation, and the balance changes."The Cardinals promise that the brand-new blacktop they poured this summer on Clark Street will change, too, to sprout a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood of condos and office buildings. When it's done, Ballpark Village will include more parking than its surface lots do now, Watermon said, but in garages, and mixed among other uses."Everything we do is going to have a very urban, pedestrian-friendly feel," he said. "Our long-term vision is to build a mixed-use neighborhood that is both complementary to our core business of baseball and hopefully will add value and transform our region."That's a long-range plan, though, with no particular timeline. In the short run, said Ogilvie, the Cardinals will be collecting $700,000 a year in parking revenue -- more once construction ends next spring on Phase One and 300 more spots open up -- cash the team won't get if the site is under construction. And the city has no legal ability to push them to build more, despite giving Ballpark Village $17 million in state and local tax incentives."We shouldn't be subsidizing low-quality design and low-paying jobs, and today that's what Ballpark Village is," Ogilvie said. "Where's the public benefit in that?"As for the Ballpark Village lot itself, it is slowly catching on. In the second inning of Wednesday night's game against the Pittsburgh Pirates, about half the spots were still empty, even as red-clad stragglers walked to the game across it from downtown.And two blocks away, in the $6-a-spot Kiener West Garage on Chestnut Street, the upper floors were mostly empty.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Visit the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at .stltoday.com Distributed by MCT Information Services新蒲崗迷你倉