City officials aiming to boost the low usage of College Park’s downtown parking garage hope more advertising, better signage and a rate jump at competing lots would drive more people to the facility.
But officials have yet to take any of these solid steps to help increase the flagging popularity of the $9.3 million garage, which opened this summer behind R.J. Bentley’s on Knox Road. Instead, they describe their strategy as long-term, and say while the advantages of the garage seem to mean little to current College Park shoppers, it could eventually attract a higher caliber of businesses to the city’s downtown.
“[People] still want to park as close as feasibly possible to the establishment that they’re going to,” city parking enforcement manager Jim Miller said. And with many people not looking to spend a lot of time downtown, the College Park Shopping Center lot just across Route 1 is as popular as ever.
“The shopping center parking lot seems to remain very full and at some times congested,” said city public services director Bob Ryan, whose department includes parking oversight.
“We’ve tried to make people aware of the parking garage across the street, but I guess people who want to run in to CVS or just pick up some takeout from Jason’s Deli want to just go straight there.”
The garage is more convenient for someone who plans to park for more than a few minutes, officials say, as they can pay with a credit card or paper money rather than with a handful of coins, and they can buy more time than in a city surface lot. The hourly rate of 75 cents is the same at surface lots operated by the city.
District 2 City Councilman Bob Catlin said earlier this semester that this would bring in customers from out of College Park who would browse multiple stores and dine downtown.
With the garage, the limiting factor of how much time such people would spend downtown is no longer a ticking parking meter but a lack of retail to visit, he said, but officials frequently describe the garage as a “catalyst” for an improved downtown.
But in the meantime, officials concede that after the garage has stood mostly empty for the entire fall semester, they would like to see more usage right now.
Miller estimated an average of 25 cars are parked at the 288-space, five-level garage at any given time — not counting a few dozen cars with long-term parking passes — a figure that’s up only slightly from the 20 cars the city was seeing earlier this semester.
“Our averages are extremely low,” Miller said. “If it’s increased, it’s been very marginal.”
Earlier this semester, the College Park City Council approved a lease for the Ledo Restaurant pizza parlor to rent the garage’s ground-floor retail space. Officials hope the pizzeria itself will bring more cars to the garage and help pay back the cost of the garage with its healthy $150,000 annual lease payment when it opens in the spring or early summer. But the council has yet to discuss either additional marketing for the garage or an informal proposal to raise parking rates at the city’s surface lots to $1 to encourage all but the shortest-term parkers to move to the garage.
Officials do note that even as the garage is frequently empty, it has had some big days. Miller said on the afternoons of two Terrapin football games every space in the garage was full.
Ryan further added that although relatively few people have parked their cars in the garage, residents seem to have welcomed the structure into the community. City maintenance staff have been repeatedly summoned to clean urine from the garage’s stairwells, he said.
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