Downtown parking study being conducted by firm
By Ethan Smith
Published in News on June 13, 2016 1:46 PM
Representatives from VHB of Raleigh held a meeting at City Hall on Thursday evening to share with the public the results so far of an $80,000 traffic study the company is conducting for the city.
About 15 people attended the meeting.
Thus far, VHB has identified high demand and low demand parking areas throughout the downtown area.
The company studied the area falling within the parameters of Elm Street, Spruce Street, Chestnut Street, Mulberry Street, George Street, Walnut Street and Ash Street. This area encompasses the entirety of downtown Goldsboro.
VHB visited Goldsboro for one day on Thursday, March 24, to gather data about when parking was in high demand downtown. According to their findings, peak demand for parking is from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Some of the highest demand areas for parking were the parking lot beside Torero's Family Mexican Restaruant, the parking lot behind B&G Grill, a parking lot to the north of City Hall and street parking on Ormond Avenue.
"We came out on Thursday, March 24, when school was in session and court was in session," said Timothy Tresohlavy, project manager and transportation planner with VHB. "Those are two very important indicators, because we didn't want to pick a day where those were out of session and there were abnormal patterns."
Measurements of how many total parking spaces were occupied downtown were taken at five different times during VHB's one day visit -- morning, lunch time, afternoon, evening and late night.
Of the 3,595 total parking spaces downtown, 680 were on-street spaces and 2,915 were off-street parking spaces. Out of the nearly 3,000 parking lot spaces, 1,249 were in public lots and 1,666 were in private lots.
If nothing changes about these parking arrangement, the downtown area will face a parking deficit by 2026 when there is more demand for parking than there are spaces.
So, VHB is asking citizens to take an online survey about what should be done next in their study to calculate suggestions as to what could improve parking downtown.
The online survey link went live six days ago, and has drawn roughly 60 responses as of the time of the meeting.
The link to the survey is www.surveymonkey.com/r/GoldsboroParking.
The survey is 15 questions long and takes about 10 minutes to complete.
Questions on the survey ask citizens to rank the most important parking issues they feel are facing downtown; how long people should be allowed to park in spaces downtown; how safe they feel using public parking lots; how long people should be allowed to park on Center Street; whether or not the city should begin charging people to park downtown; if the length of time people are allowed to park in various areas of downtown should be consistent or different; what the city should do to improve parking downtown; what the public's impressions of current downtown parking are; why the public parks downtown; how long any given citizen usually parks downtown; the length a citizen is willing to walk from a parking space to their destination; and how the walking distance from parking to destination compares to what is found at a big box store such as Walmart.
The online survey will be open to the public until Monday, June 20.