Parking Structure Would Benefit Cda Garage Wouldn’T Be A Moneymaker, But Advantages To City Would Be Great

Cities and towns large and small have parking problems, so the conundrum Coeur d’Alene faces is not unique.

If there is an area where people want to go, there has to be parking for their cars, and such buildings and lots take up a great deal of space, rarely producing sufficient revenue to justify their construction.

While Coeur d’Alene has no parking shortage in winter, tourism the rest of the year alters the picture. But even in the off-season, when most of the tourism is dormant, there will be a parking problem if all of the downtown revitalization plans yield a vigorous and healthy city center.

And if the vacancy rate increases, despite all of the rosy predictions, then there will not be a parking problem, winter or summer, a grim scenario no one wants.

Yet, and here is the conundrum: without parking, there can be no lasting boom.

At the same time, North Idaho College has parking problems of its own based on the consistent, vigorous and projected growth the campus is experiencing. Fall total enrollment at NIC topped 3,500, and this number in a few years will seem very small.

The county population will continue to rise because people move here, and the campus will attract more students from out of the area because of its unique qualities. These students will require more buildings and more parking, and these can be achieved to any meaningful degree only by decreasing the green space on the campus which makes the site such a rare jewel among colleges of any size.

So I have a suggestion that will cost the city some serious money and take years to earn back its cost - never a popular scenario.

Downtown needs a three- or four-story parking building, with an additional level or two below ground. The site would have to take a large chunk out of prime commercial real estate and be located somewhere north of Sherman between Fourth and Eighth.

Charging $1 or $2 for all-day parking, the operation would not be a moneymaker, and would take many years to pay off its costs. But the result to the downtown area would be immense. Not the least of the benefits would be the elimination of parts of the Third Street lot and subsequent conversion to some public use, which might simply mean grassing it over.

Moreover, shuttle buses running hourly between the parking structure and the college would greatly ease the congestion on campus, and would free up acres now being used at NIC for cars. That land could be increased green space or could be sites of necessary new construction, allowing the campus to expand without losing its irreplaceable beauty.

Shoppers are inherently lazy and don’t like any sort of inconvenience. Yet, without parking spaces, there is a puny upper limit to how much business the downtown can do. A parking structure downtown offers a solid, best-hope compromise. Most people will adjust to having to walk two or three blocks with their purchases to their cars. Tourists do it in most other places they visit, and there is no reason to assume they will become automatically crabbier or more resistant to Coeur d’Alene if they have to walk a little bit here.

The Walker-Macy consultants have been resistant to allowing this idea to show up on any of their published suggestions, although the notion has been submitted to them many times. It gets ignored because developers don’t want it. There are other and more profitable uses for prime downtown land, but all of those other uses, taken together, sidestep the issue of where the customers will leave their cars.

Many cities of all sorts of sizes have come to the realization that a vital downtown area has to have costly and valuable land devoted to the pesky problem of the automobile. The sooner Coeur d’Alene takes this necessary step, the sooner the remaining downtown acres will become more profitable as businesses and as the heart of a community.