Everyone knows that we have a parking problem downtown. But the problem is that we don’t always get the ideal parking space we wanted, which is not exactly the same thing as not getting a good parking place.
As the agitation of a few against New St. Andrews College continues, one of the staple arguments has been that NSA is gobbling up parking spaces downtown. This was a great argument, and a cause of real concern to retail merchants who need to have spaces available for potential customers. And so, in the spirit of Galileo, Boyle, Newton, and Faraday, the good folks at NSA decided to go outside and check.
They did so after school had started, and without informing the employees or students at NSA about what they were doing. The survey extended over the course of a week, and included the appropriate times of day, taking care to measure peak hours like lunch. The parking lot right behind NSA (in between Moscow Hotel and the Royal Motor Inn) has 147 spaces, not counting the handicap spots. Over the course of that week, on average, a motorist had 54 parking spots to choose from at any given time (54!). As the survey notes, peak hours and all, “at no time did the number of occupied parking spaces exceed 75.5 percent of the lot’s capacity.”
Once the hard, cold, scientific realities of this set in, I expect the intoleristas to shift tactics, and argue that we are driving people away from downtown, thus causing all the vacant parking spaces.