Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 5, 1994 TAG: 9404080011
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DEBORAH MOORE CLARK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Banff is a shopper's paradise. All varieties of shops, large and small, posh and practical, line its main street. Specialty boutiques abound, restaurants flourish and shoppers throng.
Banff's No. 1 industry is shopping, and they know how to promote it.
In Banff, all roadside parking spaces and garage facilities are free, encouraging shoppers to linger, relax and buy, buy, buy. There's no downtown parking problem in Banff. In fact, parking is hardly a consideration.
Except perhaps in the positive ways it hung on this shopper's mind: available, free, accessible, with no time restrictions.
One of my favorite spots in Roanoke is the City Market. But the main drawback to shopping downtown is the parking problem: 30-minute and one-hour on-street parking, and fee-assessed parking in garages and lots. Local garages offer limited two-hour free parking only on Saturdays.
Recently, a friend and I ate lunch at Carlos restaurant on the market. Beating the lunch-hour rush, we arrived for our meal at 11:30 a.m. I parked in a free one-hour space about two blocks from our destination. We walked directly to the restaurant at a moderate pace, stopping only briefly to use the First Union ATM.
One hour and 10 minutes later, we returned to my car. Fortunately, no parking ticket.
We wanted to do some antiquing and reasoned if we moved the car to another space, we would have another hour to shop. How inconvenient. My other option would have been to park in a garage or lot, and pay $3.25 for the three hours we ultimately spent in the area.
While $3.25 is not an exorbitant amount, it is enough to discourage me from leisurely shopping on the market more than once or twice a week.
Who loses? I do, but more directly, the downtown business-owners.
Local vendors are denied the income of my business. I'm deprived pleasure from frequenting a favorite spot because of my reluctance to routinely pay the added costs of cash and inconvenience. It seems good business sense for Roanoke and other urban business centers to find ways to offer free parking.
With the advent and development of shopping centers in the '60s, and shopping malls later that same decade, Americans have acquired a mall mentality about shopping. This represents quite a change from the urban shopping mindset that prevailed during the first half of the century.
It was then when shopping in downtown Roanoke and other urban centers thrived. It was then when downtown was the place to shop, perhaps the only place to shop. But not anymore.
With shopping centers on nearly every suburban corner these days, people need incentives to travel the extra distance downtown to shop. Modern shoppers need a place to park their cars without hassle and without added expense. If urban-renewal projects are to succeed, free parking, and lots of it, needs to be superimposed onto the urban shopping picture.
Who will pay the cost? Certainly our taxes will continue to subsidize urban-renewal projects. Private enterprise will bear a large portion of the bill, and no doubt will pass it along to the consumer through inflated commodity prices. So what's new? These days, nothing worthwhile comes without cost.
An alternative to totally free parking might be vendor-validated parking tokens. Distributed to customers by businesses at the time of purchase, patrons using these tokens would enjoy free parking. Window-shopping browsers would not.
The boon to both shopper and urban business could be greatly enhanced by the added service of free downtown parking, however it is worked out.
Deborah Moore Clark lives in Roanoke, and is a church musician and free-lance writer.
by CNB