Are parking lots an endangered species in Kingston?

Sounds like a bizarre question, though to be fair your Editorial Team asks bizarre questions all the time. We’re asking after the Kingston Common Council voted last week to declare a moratorium on transferring city-owned parking lots to private developers pending the results of the city’s just-launched parking study. While the council would have to approve any such transfer, making the moratorium resolution more about sending a message than stopping anything from happening, it certainly seems to us the kind of measure one would take to preserve a threatened resource.

If current trends continue, finding parking space in the Stockade neighborhood will become as difficult as spotting a rare bird in a thick forest. We and many others had written off the Kingstonian as yet another failed Uptown project, but it’s stirring to life with demolition of the old diner and plans to replace the brick Herzog’s warehouse at North Front and Fair streets with a facility in the Kingston Plaza, freeing up the existing warehouse to be remade into a hotel. Kingstonian construction will chomp up the numerous parking spaces in the so-called “crater” lot; while we’re promised a 420-space parking garage when the Kingstonian is finished, if it’s finished, the neighborhood will keenly feel the loss of that lot.

But that’s not the only parking in the neighborhood slated for extinction in the name of redevelopment. The city lot on North Front Street is expected to be the future home of a 50-unit affordable housing project, currently envisioned without off-street parking. Last week, the city and RUPCO announced plans for a 135-unit affordable housing project on the site of the closed car dealership, taking away potential relief for the expected Kingstonian-caused parking crunch.

To those who’ve kept up with the zoning changes in Kingston, this isn’t a surprise. The new code eliminated the requirement for projects to provide off-street parking. While many in the city still can’t get their heads around this, it shouldn’t have been a surprise, as the Steve Noble administration’s vibe has been, if not openly anti-car, about no longer treating automobiles as a most-favored species. We look forward to what the parking study comes up with: An open house on it is scheduled for Tuesday, Oct. 27 from 6-8 p.m. in Council Chambers at City Hall. According to the city, the study “will inventory the city’s parking supply, assess parking demand and develop parking management strategies that balance the needs of residents, businesses and visitors while also advancing the city’s multi-modal transportation priorities.”

There is a context in which to place all this. Uptown businesses have been pleading for more parking near their shops for a long time. The brutalist masterpiece that was the city’s former parking garage held a lot of cars, but it unexpectedly had to be closed and torn down in 2008 after serious structural problems emerged. The lot that was built in its place, affectionately known as “the crater,” holds fewer cars but isn’t often full. But if you have problems climbing either a long staircase or a steep-ish hill, it doesn’t work. Most are tempted to at least try to find a parking space at street level before settling for the crater. Some Uptown merchants fretted over the parking meters’ return 16 years ago, especially after at least one city official said one of the motivations for them was to prevent business owners from taking up a spot all day. (Prior to the meters, the policy was two-hour parking, which was not really that enforced.)

We get why business owners are upset. Their customers compete with the many professional workers who commute every day to Uptown; when a jury call goes out from Ulster County Court, spaces get rarer still. There’s always Kingston Plaza across Schwenk Drive, but now you’re talking the kind of longer walk that people only tolerate when they have to be in Uptown, but not when they just want to be in Uptown. A years-long parking drought could result in, besides an uptick in fender-benders and road rage, Uptown returning to the time when the businesses there catered mostly to city residents arriving via the trolley. The neighborhood could end up going from a place where a lot of people come in from elsewhere to spend money to a place where only the businesses locals sufficiently support will survive. But Uptown is more resilient than it gets credit for – businesses come and go, sure, but the major vacancies in the Stockade exist not because no one wants to set up shop here anymore but for other financial reasons.

If we’re being asked to get by on less parking, which we are any way you slice it, your Editorial Team has a plan. Other cities have tourist-oriented hop-on/hop-off trolley buses where you pay one fare, get a sticker and can ride on it all day. We’d love to see such a bus (electric, of course) on a loop from the Strand to the Stockade seven days a week from early morning to fairly late in the evening. This should be coupled with free shuttle vans running from more distant parking lots like Kingston Plaza, the mall and iPark 87 into the heart of the city. A system like this, if embraced by the public, would go a long way toward reducing the demand for parking. Fewer cars also means safer streets and better air quality.

A plan like that seems like common sense to us, but it’s all theoretical until the parking study comes out. So until then, as long as you aren’t trying to steal a spot we want, may the parking odds be ever in your favor.