Transit Time — Back to work conundrum: where to park?
You’re reading Transit Time, a weekly newsletter for Charlotte people who leave the house. Cars, buses, light rail, bikes, scooters … if you use it to get around the city, we write about it. Transit Time is produced in partnership among The Charlotte Ledger, WFAE and the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute.
As workers return to uptown offices, demand for parking spaces is rising. Expect spaces to be pricey and in short supply again this fall.
by Ely Portillo
With smaller employers returning to the office and the big banks bringing most of their workers back over the next few months, Charlotteans who work uptown will be confronted with a question many haven’t thought about for more than a year: Where will I park?
It’s a simple question with big ramifications, both for the future of Charlotte — an auto-dependent city trying to wean itself from absolute reliance on cars — and workers’ finances. A reserved spot in an uptown garage can easily cost $200 or more a month, adding a $2,400 annual expense. Although non-reserved garage spots and surface lots can be cheaper, they still generally run anywhere from $50 to $200 a month.
Despite new mass transit options on the horizon, endless think pieces about the future of remote work and high-profile moves like Duke Energy’s reducing office space 60%, one thing is clear: A convenient parking spot in uptown is still going to be a hot and pricey commodity. Parking operators aren’t touting any discounts, and some garages like Center City Green across from the Spectrum Center still have waitlists for monthly spots.
“Transient (daily) parking has come back very quickly as things have opened up. On the monthly parkers side, it’s coming back slowly,” said Steve McClure, CEO of Spectrum Cos., which manages garages in office towers including 300 South Tryon and 230 South Tryon. But with the banks offering more definitive timetables about returning (Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan pointed to “Labor Day or mid-September” last week), McClure has a prediction: “Things are going to ramp up very quickly. We’ll get back to pre-Covid levels soon.”
A walk around uptown last week showed how much things have changed from the winter, when center city on a typical workday still looked Christmas-morning empty. Although they weren’t full, the parking garages and surface lots of uptown are no longer vacant. Several garages were full up to the top couple of floors, and street parking was once again hard to find on busy streets.
[🎧 “Future Charlotte” podcast: What will parking look like when you go back to work?]
Several major parking lot operators painted a similar picture: In the early days of the shutdown, March 2020, daily parking immediately fell to near-zero and stayed there. Data from the city of Charlotte shows parking transactions at the city’s metered spots were down by more than half in August 2020 (when Charlotte started enforcing metered parking again) compared to the prior year.
Roger Stacks, president and CEO of Preferred Parking — you’ve doubtless seen their red-and-white signs across the city — said revenue was down an average of 48% last year. Some garages and lots, however, were down 80%.
“Business ground to a halt, and ours did also,” said Stacks. Nevertheless, some monthly parkers held onto their spots.
“Employees maintained their parking because of the uncertainty. People expected to be coming back in the fall,” said David Pitser, Childress Klein’s Charlotte-based director of property management. Childress Klein handles parking at office towers like One, Two and Three Wells Fargo and the Duke Energy Center.
But once it became apparent that almost no one was going back to the office in 2020, and maybe not until late 2021, monthly parkers quickly cancelled their contracts. Parking is down anywhere from 40% to 60% in their garages, Pitser said.
It’s only the second time Pitser’s seen uptown’s parking supply exceed demand. The first was after the Great Recession.
“All of the garages, historically, had lengthy waitlists. It could be several years for a space to open up,” he said. That’s changing, however. “We are seeing a sudden, but expected, spike for people registering for parking again.”
Still, not everyone is looking forward to a seamless return to the parking deck. Shannon Binns, executive director of Sustain Charlotte, said he hopes people will consider other ways to get back to the office.
“It’s not an inevitability that the commute has to be awful and parking has to be a struggle,” he said. “This is the time to say ‘I want better choices.’”
We have a complicated relationship with parking. Workers have to shell out thousands of dollars a year to go to their jobs; developers pay millions of dollars to build less-profitable parking decks that take up much of the space they could otherwise turn into leasable, top-dollar offices or apartments; and urbanists rage against the blocks of “cars behind bars” and oceans of hot asphalt that suck vitality from city streets.
Jail or parking structure? You make the call.
Despite Charlotte’s decade-long building boom, about 144 acres of uptown is still devoted to surface parking lots, according to an analysis by Clayton Sealey of CLT Development. This spring, The Atlantic ran a story titled “How Parking Destroys Cities,” which generally describes the regard in which many hold parking. Several parking operators were hesitant to speak on the record about a mundane subject that provokes ire — monthly parking — which one termed a “necessary evil.”
But damn if we don’t love a good parking spot. Is there anything sweeter than finding an open spot right by the elevator, or near the exit so you slip out at 5 p.m. on the dot without waiting behind a line of cars trying to get out of the deck?
Out of necessity or choice, more than 7 in 10 Charlotteans drive alone to work. The proportion is a bit lower for uptown workers, according to Charlotte Center City Partners: About 57% drive to work, while 29% walk, almost 10% telecommute and 2.9% take public transit (the rest get to work by “other” means).
Since more than 120,000 people work uptown, and there are roughly 55,000 professionally managed parking spaces available, that means that even if a significant number of people adopt some kind of hybrid schedule, demand for parking is likely to exceed supply. Working two days a week at home won’t matter much in terms of making parking easier if most people are coming in Tuesday-Thursday, for example.
“We villainize parking in some ways. The truth, is it’s an essential asset,” said Michael Smith, CEO of Charlotte Center City Partners. His prediction: Uptown’s parking growth will slow as more people work from home sometimes and new transit options like the Silver Line open, but we’re not going to see that growth stop.
“In our economic development work,” said Smith, “when we meet with professionals and it gets down to space, it quickly turns to ‘How will I park this?’”
Parking operators and developers are planning for the return of office workers, but they’re also planning for a future that looks slightly different. Stacks said his company is expecting a return to a sense of normalcy by the end of the year. Preferred Parking is also exploring new options, like a punch-card type system that would give workers who have to be in the office only some of the time the option to buy 10 days per month of parking, instead of the standard monthly unlimited option.
Even seemingly simple plans like that come with more ripple effects to puzzle out. Pitser, of Childress Klein, said they’re looking at similar ideas. But if you sell 10-day passes instead of a set number of monthly passes, what happens if more people try to park in a garage one day than the garage has capacity for?
“It’s not good for us when people who depend on our parking facility to support their business can’t find parking,” he said. They’re exploring ways to tie parking reservations to hot desk reservations for tenants in the office towers Childress Klein manages — the kind of banal but indispensable infrastructure we’ll have to work out to support true hybrid workplaces.
Whatever the future holds, Smith had one more simple prediction: “I will be surprised if we’re a city that needs less parking than we have now.”
Ely Portillo is assistant director at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. He previously spent a decade as a reporter at The Charlotte Observer.
Transit boost in 2040 Comprehensive Plan
The Charlotte City Council passed the 2040 plan as expected this week in a 6-5 vote. Now, the city will have to move on to the nitty-gritty of writing rules and policy to implement the changes.
But it’s clear that transit, and ways of getting around beside cars, will benefit in the coming decades.
Two of the 10 plan goals are explicitly about transportation:
Goal 4: “Charlotte will promote moderate to high-intensity, compact, mixed-use urban development along high performance transit lines and near separated shared-use paths or trails.”
Goal 5: “Charlotte will provide safe and equitable mobility options for all travelers regardless of age, income, ability, race, where they live, or how they choose to travel. An integrated system of transit and tree-shaded bikeways, sidewalks, shared-use paths, and streets will support a sustainable, connected, prosperous, and innovative network that connects all Charlotteans to each other, jobs, housing, amenities, goods, services, and the region.” —EP
In brief…
Costs rising on transit plan: Internal city emails show that a city official was estimating the cost of the transit plan at $20 billion over 30 years earlier this year — as other officials were saying publicly that the costs were $8 billion to $12 billion. Emails obtained by WBTV under public records laws show that Special Assistant to the City Manager Shawn Heath wrote in an email to Planning Director Taiwo Jaiyeoba and CFO Kelly Flannery that the lower figures were only capital costs and did not include operating expenses. Officials have told the City Council that the $8 billion to $12 billion cost estimate is being studied and revised. City Council members are expected to be briefed on the project, including a new cost estimate, on Monday. (WBTV)
Could your work-from-home habit prevent a full recovery for Charlotte’s transit system? Ridership is slowly creeping back, but Charlotte’s transit numbers are still way down from pre-pandemic levels. (WFAE)
It pays to be on top: CATS chief executive John Lewis is the second-highest paid city of Charlotte employee, behind city manager Marcus Jones. Lewis takes home $272,635, up 6.1% from 2019, according to the Charlotte Business Journal. (CBJ)
Seeking bus drivers: The Charlotte Area Transit System is looking for bus drivers. Pay starts at $17 an hour, and the agency says it will “assist qualified applicants” who need a commercial driver's license with a passenger endorsement. (CATS)
Regional transit plan recommendations coming next month: Connect Beyond, the joint planning effort between CATS and the Centralina Regional Council, plans to release its preliminary recommendations for creating, funding and managing a regional transit system on July 22. You can stream the event live. (Centralina Regional Council)
Tell planners how the Silver Line should develop: CATS opened a survey this week seeking feedback about how stations on the planned 29-mile Silver Line should grow and information about potential riders' priorities. Give your input online here: https://publicinput.com/SilverLineTOD
Love on the light rail: One morning five years ago on the Lynx Blue Line, Pam was reading a book. George was looking at his phone. They struck up a conversation … and today, they’re married. Their advice on finding love? “In a city of nearly 1 million people, you just might find your soul mate — but you’ll have to look up from your phone or book before the moment passes.” (Observer)
Transit Time is a production of The Charlotte Ledger, WFAE and the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute.
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