Cooper: More parking thought needed

Could an expanded electric shuttle route be a component in helping solve Chattanooga's downtown parking problem?
Could an expanded electric shuttle route be a component in helping solve Chattanooga's downtown parking problem?

North Shore resident Robert Drake unintentionally may have spoken for thousands of Chattanoogans last week about a variety of issues when he addressed the City Council on the proposed downtown zoning plan.

"There seems to be a decision-making shift from the communities in which we have residents and neighbors and businesses," he said, "to a centralized committee structure that may not be sensitive to the needs of the city."

Drake was specifically referring to the zoning plan, which many residents don't believe provides enough parking and others believe doesn't allow them to adequately develop their property.

He might just as easily have been referring to the bike lanes foisted upon Broad Street (and planned elsewhere) with little public debate. Or he could have been referring to the Brainerd Road Overlay Zone Draft Ordinance, which requires business owners making new builds or significant renovations to adopt new and expensive landscape designs for their projects to be approved. Or he could have been referring to various other regulations that have come down the pike.

To be sure, the changes already made and those foreseen in the new zoning plans have pluses and minuses. But so much of it feels handed down from above - from an elite group that knows best to the unwashed masses who have made their work and their home in Chattanooga for years.

Drake's statement even could have applied to Washington, D.C., where the federal government has been transformed in the last eight years under President Barack Obama into a central planning agency. Power is concentrated in an unchecked chief executive and a series of created agencies and appointed bureaucrats.

It's how we got the Affordable Care Act, which was written by Democratic strategists with no Republican input and passed through tit-for-tat deals and budget trickery.

It's how we got what Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., called a "national school board," which essentially was the Department of Education making decisions for Hamilton County schoolchildren. Fortunately, the GOP-led Senate was able to arrest some of that power last year when it passed the Every Student Succeeds Act.

But on the proposed downtown zoning plan, which would affect every parcel of property in the central city, on the North Shore and in the Southside down to Interstate 24, the optimum strategy would be to take all the time that's necessary.

"There is no need for a rush to judgment," urban designer Garnet Chapin told the City Council, which will take its first vote on the new form-based zoning plan on Tuesday. "We're building the city of the future, so let's get it right."

In most of the 2,900-parcel area covered by the code, commercial buildings must have at least one parking space per 1,000 square feet. Public-involved panels that brainstormed the issue recently recommended commercial buildings guarantee anywhere from .75 spaces per 1,000 square feet up to two or more spaces for every 1,000 square feet.

But are there additional solutions?

Chattanooga has a wonderful asset in its free downtown electric shuttle. Could the shuttle routes, which currently go north to Frazier Avenue and south to the Chattanooga Choo Choo, be extended to include other downtown parking and housing areas that already exist or might be built just outside the central city area?

New parking garages, for instance, could serve both daily parkers from the suburbs, who would then catch a shuttle to their job, and downtown residents who could grab a shuttle back out to their car if they needed to leave the area. The number of cars in the central city could drop dramatically.

The expanded electric shuttle system would have to pay for itself, of course, so downtown residents and commuters who regularly use it would have to pay, but the amount would not need to be exorbitant.

And, yes, parking garages are not inherently attractive or cheap, but they could be strategically placed and nicely landscaped. And their usefulness in keeping more cars out of the central city would be more important than their utilitarian look.

Savannah, Ga., a city with a heavy tourist traffic like Chattanooga, has five city-owned parking garages - and a free shuttle, though not electric - that locals like to tell visitors have made a difference in keeping traffic out of their beloved historic district.

It seems apparent that more time and thinking need to be put into the zoning plan and its parking component. We hope City Council members have heard that from affected residents and business owners, who are not against having a greener and cleaner central city but don't want to make it harder to live there or undesirable for folks from the outside to come in.

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