Dearest G,

You should try a little import…. a Toyota or Honda in particular. They are far in a way better, safer, cheaper $$, and faster then the US built crap, plus they’re made here too. If they fail in the first few years an engineer at the parent company must comit suicide…. you can bet that doesn’t happen in Detroit!!!!!!!! 🙂 Even a VW is better than one of the excreations from the “big three”.

EDITOR NOTE–Must confess to driving the best of two worlds: An American built Toyota.

Well, the garage guy says it’s not a design flaw, people just need to drive slower, learn to make the tight turns, etc.

Kinda like a restaurant says there’s nothing wrong with the food, people just need to remember to take their antitoxidants before dinner. Or a gas station saying there’s nothing wrong with the pump, people just need to learn that they have to pull the nozzle out, shut it off and restart it after each 1.37 gallons.

When you build something for the public and then say the public just has to learn to do everything different than usual, you either screwed up big time in the design and are just too stupid to realize it, or do realize it and are to much of a damned sniveling liar to admit it.

As for the big/vs. little vehicles, we have a Mazda Miata that probably would fit in there just fine. I also have a one-ton pickup that probably would drive right over the little Miata and not even feel the bump.

Little cars are cute, economical to operate and fun to drive, but I wouldn’t want to try to transport a ton of hay or a soccer team or the supplies for the Little League team in one. Yeah, some people drive the giants (Hummers come to mind) for no paticular reason other than to look big, but many have legit reasons to do so.

We also have a Jeep Grand Cherokee that can pull a luggage trailer, and can get us out of our driveway when there’s more than the two inches of snow that block the Miata.

I won’t try to put either the one-ton or the Cherokee in that garage, but I wouldn’t put the Miata in there, either, for fear *somebody else* would bring their bigger vehicle in and mash it.

Seems like it might be a good idea to build public facilities to serve *all* the public, not just the few who are nervy or foolish enough to put the small vehicles in the undersized holes. Thank God for ADA, or jerks like those would still be putting up structures with steep stairs, no ramps, narrow doors, etc., and saying, well, handicapped and disabled people will just have to learn to walk or crawl in.

Mayor and staff should have to park in it as part of a (pilot) awareness program….heehee.

It is geometry. Thankfully that is one math class I managed to understand in school.

The city regulations say a developer has to provide so many parking spaces for so many stores of a certain size and type. To get a good store and restaurant mix (restaurants taking up more parking spaces than stores), BoDo has to build a parking structure with X-amount of lots in it. Okay, but there are also restrictions on the parking structures physical size because it has to fit on a specific lot, hemmed in by busy city streets. And the building can only be so tall because it is in the viewscape between the Depot and the Capitol Building.

The answer for the developer would have been to use existing store space for more parking – evicting existing tenants – or to make a taller building – something that may have been impossible to do.

The deal sounds like a bad compromise all around (shrinking the turning radii and stall size). The City of Boise is going to face this same issue again and again as downtown redevelopment continues. If we want parking downtown and if we want a vibrant downtown, we’re going to have make some concessions. I just don’t know yet what that should be.

The original ‘concept’ for BoDo shows the parking garage was supposed to be 450 space on 5 levels – 4 above and 1 below. The current design is 380 spaces. You have to wonder where the other 70 spaces would have fit.

EDITOR NOTE–Good points all, but the parking structure is owned by Boise’s urban renewal agency, the CCDC (Capitol City Devbelopment Corp.) and it is built with tax money.

Not that it solves any of the tight corners or skinny spaces at the garage, but Boise’s zoning ordinance doesn’t require ANY parking for any use within the BoDo development. It is exempted from off-street parking requirements, since it all fits comfortably within what is referred to as the P-1 Parking Overlay District. Actually, the southern boundary of the P-1 District generally runs along the centerline of Front Street but takes a dip south to Myrtle Street (between Ninth Street and Capitol Blvd) IN ORDER to eliminate the need for any required parking in the BoZo development.

Though the 380 spaces are hard to squeeze into, if none were built these non-existent spaces would be murder to get into. But more to the point, if a city’s zoning ordinance is viewed as a legal proxy for the will of the people – and adherence to the terms of the ordinance is seen as the best way to protect the health, welfare, and safety of the public – why is any tax money being used to subsidize parking that the PUBLIC has already said it doesn’t need. I can understand why Mark Rivers wants parking for his tenants, but why is any public money being spent to construct off-street parking within the P-1 District? If CCDC wishes to subsidize downtown development with its pre-approved bonding capacity, let it focus on what the public has already said it wants – and eliminate the agency’s ability to fund development that does not comply with the will of the people. If CCDC (or Boise City administration) have a beef with this line of thinking, it can choose to eliminate or modify the Parking District Overlay language.

Stop trying to subvert the law.

FYI, one of the newer (and more successful) examples of this kind of urban infill is Santana Row in San Jose. It also has structured parking (but with very gracious drive aisles and stall widths), and everyone parks for FREE. It’s easy to bash Californians, but it looks like they got it right with Santana Row.

Why not charge for it like any other good or service ? The more space you take up, the more you should pay.

So, there would be a certain number of smaller stalls (existing size) and then some stalls that are larger to accommodate larger-than-average vehicles. Since the larger stalls take up more room, there would be fewer of them, so they’d cost more.

In the end, the garage would collect the same amount of money, Chevy Subdivisions would have a place to park and normal size vehicles would park as usual.

Regading the editor’s note above, true, Ameritel and other hotels have to build their own parking lots, but it comes at a huge public cost. Places like the mall, for example, are about half parking lot by surface area, a quarter roads and a quarter for the actual building destination – a horrendously inefficient use of land and infrastructure. As a result, the ACHD must make roads wider and longer simply to accommodate the huge private parking lots. The huge parking lots mean people drive a couple of hundred feet from one parking lot to the other, causing more air pollution. Impact fees can’t begin to cover this. Sweet deal for the airport-area hotels.

Garages are very space efficient and allow public streets to be shorter and smaller. They’re a good investment.

SW – I wish you luck in finding “polite” parkers that will be so impressed that you got your SUV into the garage that they will exhale as they spend an extra minute getting out of their car as to not ding your door. We have not found many of those types around Boise and we have the dings from normal size lots to prove it.

Maybe your best bet is that you will basically be the only one parking in the cramped garage and therefore there will be no one else will be parking next to you.

Both situations may be just dreaming though.