TODAY: Lake Grove Parking Forum

If you want to see what is being planned for parking in the Lake Grove Town Center (shopping district), come to the forum offered by the city at:

6:30 pm, at the WEB Building.

Test the planners for their knowledge and responsiveness to citizen issues.

Things to look for:

• Will apartment dwellers be able to park in the public lots all day and/or overnight?  What's to stop them?  

• How will this help local residential streets that are impacted now?  Will there be cut-through traffic?  Will the lots be too far for people to want to use them? 

• Are the plans based on hopes, theories and guesses, or on research and facts?  To say they are environmentally friendly or part of a compact urban plan is not enough.  The plan has to work!  

• Will there be enough parking for the businesses that exist and that are planned for the future?  Don't forget about employee parking!!!

• What auto-to-business ratio are the planners using?  If modifiers are applied for proximity to "transit", or because planners believe people will suddenly begin to start walking and biking to stores and restaurants, there's a good chance parking will be insufficient.  (Current examples are Lake Grove Shopping Center, Oakridge Park Apartments, Wells Fargo Bank.  

• Even if new lots take the pressure off strained local streets now, what will happen if future apartments and/or businesses are not required to build enough parking spaces to meet their own demands?

Let's hope that the community is heard, and not only will the lots function as hoped, but that future development is required to supply adequate parking for their needs (enough so that they do not create spill-over off-site parking).  Nearby residents should not have to pay the penalty for faulty planning!  Especially when the problems are predictable and solutions that work are well known.

Someday, when personal cars are banned, or when autonomous cars no longer need to park, those wastelands of asphalt can be developed - but we are not there yet.  For now, we still need places to put our cars.  And hey - a lot of us still want to drive!  (How many planners drove to work today?)