Parking in Downtown Des Moines
Lately there has been lots of talk about parking in the news as studies have cities rethinking the downtown parking dilema. What issue? Does more parking available make more people want to be downtown or does less parking make downtown more livable? It is said that parking is about more than drivers’ convenience; it can profoundly affect the look and feel of a city.
Nearly all U.S. cities have requirements for off-street parking. Whenever anything a new office building or condo building is built, a minimum number of parking spaces must be included. Some cities are now considering scrapping those requirements as part of a growing national trend. So, you ask why the change of mind? There is new thinking that offering the freedom to forgo parking will lead to a denser, more walkable, downtown area. Others say that making parking more scarce will only make a city less hospitable, especially for commuters.
Parking requirements — known to planners as “parking minimums” — have been around since the 1950s. The theory is that if buildings don’t provide their own parking, too many drivers will try to park on neighborhood streets. In practice, critics say, the requirements create an excess supply of parking, making it artificially cheap. That, the argument goes, encourages unnecessary driving and makes congestion worse. Those standards also encourage developers to pave unsightly surface lots or build new parking structures instead of inviting storefronts.
Some cities are now replacing the minimum requirement with a cap on the maximum allowable number of parking spaces. It would be interesting to know what Des Moines city planners think about parking here. The one thing I will say is that most of the parking ramps downtown have a nice look to them. For me parking was a huge consideration when purchasing a condo downtown. The Liberty Condos has its own parking garage right across the street, and it’s connected to the skywalk, a huge plus in the buying decision.
Downtown employers, Wells Fargo Financial and EMC Insurance both built new parking ramps as part of their campus improvements over the last several years. A couple examples of imaginative solutions to parking is the 111 City Lofts who put their parking on the first floor of their building and the Davis Brown Tower who included a parking ramp between the retail street level floors and the upper level office floors of the building. Currently Principal Financial also has a large parking ramp under construction.
There are supposedly over 30,000 parking spaces downtown, this includes parking ramp spaces, metered spaces, and surface lots. The City of Des Moines owns eight public parking ramps. A great resource for finding parking downtown is the Where to Park page on DowntownDesMoines.com.
By MulderDSM
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Posted under Living Downtown | Last modified on September 21st, 2008.
Tags: Parking
