What a weekend.
Saturday featured the Live Oak Public Libraries’ Savannah Children’s Book Festival in Forsyth Park, the Telfair Art Fair in Telfair Square and the Savannah Food & Wine Festival’s Taste of Savannah in Ellis Square.
Plus, plenty of tourists and locals were out shopping in the Historic District’s key commercial corridors. The Forsyth Farmers’ Market attracts a big crowd on Saturdays, too.
While everyone else was having a good time, I was thinking about parking.
I have received a number of interesting emails since last Tuesday’s City Talk about the pressure on downtown parking, so consider this column as the first of several follow-ups.
By early Saturday afternoon, many neighborhood streets on the west side of downtown were pretty much filled with cars.
The civic center lot was full, and there were half a dozen cars lined up to get into the garage on Bryan Street.
The Liberty Street garage is closed on Saturdays, but that might eventually have to change. With tourism becoming increasingly year-round and the downtown retail scene growing more robust, we’re likely to see more days like Saturday.
The downtown parking crunch would be much worse if so many folks were not riding bikes.
We routinely hear automobile drivers complain about bicyclists downtown, but would we rather have all those folks in cars that put a greater strain on limited parking?
Improving bicycle access is certainly in downtown’s long-term interests. We’ll likely one day have a more robust transit system too, maybe even a streetcar.
But for now — and for many years to come — a large percentage of area residents will have to drive if they are going to come downtown at all.
I occasionally get stereotyped as some bicycle zealot, but I’ve been complaining in this column for years about the fact that we aren’t working harder to accommodate as many on-street parking spaces as possible.
Within the past year, in response to a growing demand for parking, the city replaced parallel spaces on the first block of West Park Avenue with angled ones. The common-sense measure increased parking on the block by about 50 percent.
The angled parking also makes Park Avenue safer for pedestrians since traffic is going more slowly and since it’s a shorter walk through the travel lanes.
We have angled parking on some other key downtown blocks, but there’s room for such parking in many other places. It’s a straightforward way to increase the number of parking spaces at minimal cost while possibly generating more revenue from meters and also boosting nearby businesses.
In an upcoming column, I’ll take an even closer look at some ways that we could increase the downtown parking stock at little cost.
City Talk appears every Sunday and Tuesday. Bill Dawers can be reached via billdawers@comcast.net and http://www.billdawers.com. Send mail to 10 E. 32nd St., Savannah, GA 31401.