Those of you who have followed my blog for a while know that I objected when the vintage Ramada/Sahara Motel in downtown Phoenix was demolished. You also know that I was critical of ASU and the City of Phoenix’s callous reaction to the community’s concerns.

I am even more opposed to their proposed  use of the lot for parking.

Most of us thought the parking lot was a forgone conclusion (and remained skeptical that a Law School will be built anytime soon). However, my friend Sean Sweat wasn’t willing to give up the fight for a more pedestrian friendly downtown. He came up with an ingenious alternative to propose: a downtown dog park. He was able to convince is condo community, St Croix Villas (which are 300 ft from the land in question) to file an appeal of the zoning decision.  As a result, there is new  hope that this piece of land can be something in addition to simply a warehouse for cars: a dog park.

Why the Ramada/Sahara Lot?

Before I get to Sean’s rationale, I wanted to answer a question that has come up several time in our quest for supporting a downtown Dog Park: Why here and not at Hance Park?

Our response is simply this: Hance Park may be the easier solution, but it isn’t the best one. It is most important to have one that is used by the largest number of people and do the most to promote a pedestrian friendly downtown core.

A quick look at a map of downtown Phoenix will show that there are far more people (and dogs) living in walking distance to the Sahara/Ramada lot than Hance Park. Moreover, while many residents adjacent to Hance Park live in houses with yards for their pets, most downtown core residents live in apartments and condos. Building a dog park at Hance Park would leave over half of the current downtown residents without easy pedestrian access to it. Finally, building a dog park at Hance Park would not build on the efforts of the City and small businesses to create a pedestrian corridor along First Street. A dog park at the Ramada/Sahara site would.

If you aren’t convinced that downtown Phoenix needs a dog park, or think that the Sahara/Ramada lots isn’t the right place for one, here is Sean’s carefully reasoning in his own words (with minor copy edits):

Background

I know some readers know the Sahara Hotel’s sad story as Blooming Rock has blogged about it many times, but new readers don’t. Therefore, if you are already quite familiar with the topic, skip ahead. Otherwise, continue below.

In February of this year, the City of Phoenix purchased an entire downtown block containing the old Sahara Hotel. The City now plans to pave the bulldozed site into a 90,000 sq. ft. (2 acres) surface parking lot for the exclusive use of the Sheraton Hotel and a news organization. Then, when ASU has the funds for a new law school in “3-5 years”, they plan to build it on this site.

So you just heard the punchline of chapter one: the City tore down the four-story Sahara Hotel. The Downtown Voices Coalition and a number of residents and advocates fought diligently to try to write a different ending to that chapter; wanting to save the building itself for various reasons. In the end their focus shifted to at least preventing the City from obtaining a zoning permit to turn the land into a massive surface parking lot in the center of our downtown. But in the end the City, rather than the people of Phoenix, controlled the end of the chapter.

Everyone assumed that this was a one-chapter book. However, St Croix Villas, a residential community 300 ft from the land in question, of which I’m a member, filed an appeal of the zoning decision. So began chapter two.

Simple Reasons to Reject a Parking Lot

• Most downtowns have 2-3 parking spaces per 1000 sq. ft. of office space. Phoenix’s downtown has 5. The City will and has given excuses, but it’s still a fact that we have no shortage of parking in our downtown.

• The City’s expectation to build the law school in “3-5 years” is empty posturing. Our economy is tanked and our budget problems, which have been a major issue in 2010, are actually forecasted to get much worse in 2011 and 2012. Whatever happens to that land now, will be there for a long, long time.

• The reason the City, and more accurately the Sheraton Hotel, wants a parking lot is simple: revenue. The Sheraton currently charges $17 to park all day in its garage. So when the Sheraton has events and their garage fills up, they want to tell the nice people from Paradise Valley and Apache Junction that the next closest parking is this new lot they just built and only costs $12! Currently they have to direct those people to an existing two-acre parking lot just 300 feet further away that charges only $5 (privately owned). As I write this at ten o’clock at night, that parking lot has all of 3 vehicles surrounded by 250 empty spaces of dead land.

“Okay Sean—yawn—how much harm can another parking lot really do to downtown? Why all the time, effort, and money spent to fight something that the City government has already promised its corporate bedfellows?”

Complex Reasons to Reject a Parking Lot

A massive parking lot really has no adverse effects in suburbia where the only effective mode of transportation is an automobile. However, there are three very real reasons that a parking lot is severely harmful to a downtown—especially one just getting off the ground after decades of neglect and mismanagement—such as ours.

1) Urban Heat Island

Parking lots trap solar energy and slowly discharge that energy as heat throughout the day. This is formally called the Heat Island Effect. It occurs in all major urban areas, and Phoenix is notoriously the most dramatic in the nation. According to which study you happen to read—many of which come from ASU itself—Phoenix’s urban core suffers from temperatures 5-12° hotter than it would under natural conditions.

During a time when our leaders should be exploring ways to ease this semi-avoidable problem, they are instead planning massive parking lots and making a bad problem worse. The City says that they will offer 7% shade cover via some scattered trees; that leaves 93% of the asphalt to cook us alive.

2) Pedestrianism will suffer from increased auto usage.

This is formally determined by what are called four-step models; the conventional method of transportation forecasting. I have reason to believe that no one in City Hall, and especially the Community & Economic Development department that is pushing for this massive parking lot, knows how to perform one of these. Yet they are making transportation decisions. One element of the four-step model is a mode choice calculation. The “mode” of someone’s trip could be walking, cycling, driving, or using transit.

Part 1: Primary Loss

By increasing the parking supply, the City will be directly inducing more trips by car. This is because when the City increases the supply, they will be lowering the cost as measured by  both $ and convenience (and parking will become more convenient). When they lower the parking cost, they increase driving demand.

This will be borne out by people deciding that parking is easy enough that they can drive downtown rather than use transit. More cars will also result from people not putting in as much effort to carpool. Those are both examples of mode choice shifts. But it is also expected that this cheaper parking will generate new trips downtown (via automobile), again piling more cars into downtown without adding a single pedestrian.

Peggy Neely (City Councilwoman for District 2) proved on Blooming Rock a few weeks ago that she understands this concept of mode shift very well:

“We have to encourage people to ride transit and if we have lots of parking lots and it’s very cheap … they will pick the car every time … we need to encourage parking to be (more expensive) or you’re not going to get the cars off the street.”

Part 2: Secondary Loss

Safety is a major factor in whether pedestrianism is an attractive mode or not. Safety for a pedestrian means two things: “Will a car kill me?” and “Will a mugger kill me?”

Will a car kill me?

That depends on how many cars—and how many pedestrians—there are. Imagine walking through across 12th Street & Camelback. There are many more cars than pedestrians. In that environment, cars do not watch for pedestrians. It would be like me watching for deer in Manhattan. But in downtown there are many more pedestrians than in uptown, and so cars are much more aware of pedestrians, making it safer for us.

If the City adds more cars without adding more pedestrians, then the City will be making pedestrianism less safe and thereby less attractive.

Will a mugger kill me?

That depends on how many pedestrians are out walking the street. If you’re alone on a street, no matter how lit, it feels unsafe whether that’s true or not (and it very well might be). More pedestrians on the road equate to pedestrian safety.

You can see the X in the right column of the chart above. Those are lost pedestrians due to a mode shift. By losing those pedestrians, pedestrianism becomes less safe (real or perceived). This leads to less comfortable pedestrians and more pedestrians lost outright. (The trips might shift to another mode, or they might be foregone completely.)

In summary, the City’s massive parking lot for the Sheraton damages downtown’s pedestrianism.

3) Pedestrianism will suffer from parking being closer to the Sheraton.

Currently, overflow visitors to Sheraton events, which are the primary intended users of the City’s massive proposed parking lot, park at some distance from the Sheraton. This distance is nothing egregious, and Americans could stand to walk a few extra steps these days.

As alluded to in the previous section, these mini-trips on foot improve our ped-to-car ratio (i.e. cars become less likely to use people as speed bumps) and increase the pedestrian presence (i.e. Crazy Joe won’t shiv you for your chewing gum). Mini-trips on foot are also taken by the people using the light rail. If the City gives these event-goers curbside service to their destination, eliminating these mini-trips, then it further harms our ped-to-car ratio and pedestrian presence.

In summary, the City’s massive parking lot for the Sheraton damages downtown’s pedestrianism.

SOLUTION

A dog park.

They can pave a parking lot on the southern half of the site. That should afford the City about 120 spaces. On the northern half would be a grassy dog park. We’ll even let people in, too. My calculations show 500-600 current households within a half-mile (a comfortable walking distance) that would use this dog park.

This acre of park space helps ameliorate the heat island effect, especially near Taylor Place, a 1200-student residence. Also, since the dog park would subsume half of the parking that the City wants to create, all the negative effects that we listed above would be reduced (we’ll assume by half).

This dog park takes it even further though, because we would create a focused and significant pedestrian destination, which is something that downtown sorely lacks today. First Street is the most focused pedestrian area of downtown, and this dog park would be a meaningful nexus on that street.

This would increase pedestrian trips that would re-balance the ped-to-car ratio and replace the pedestrian trips lost by the event-goers’ mode shift to cars. All-in-all, the dog park would neutralize the negative impacts of the adjacent parking lot; not to mention the community that dog parks build. (Talk to any city’s parks director and they’ll gush about the community benefits of dog parks.)

Quickly, I also have to bring up how this would cast downtown in a very different light. This would be a downtown park that would actually get used, which is in stark contrast to Civic Space Park or Hance Deck Park. People love dog parks and, without one, downtown is undoubtedly missing out on potential residents. A suburban dog owner interested in moving downtown might be dissuaded when they see there are no dog parks and they would no longer have a yard. A quote from Valerie Porter on twitter when I asked who would be interested in a downtown dog park:

“I’d be more inclined to live downtown if there was a central dog park. The one at Papago Park is a big neighborhood meetup.”

While the City would need to fund the creation of the park (it can simply use the planned asphalt costs for that half of the site) and probably a portion of the maintenance costs, I am working to raise private funds from pet-oriented businesses to cover most of the maintenance. Such a business having their name printed on a sign in the dog park is the most effective and targeted marketing possible.

My point is, this compromise improves the community and downtown while the City and the Sheraton still get some of what they want—and it’s possible.

Beseechment

I’m all for working with the City. I just wish the City was all for working with the people of Phoenix. In order to get the City to take the needs of residents seriously, we need to show that downtowners want this. We need numbers. We need signatures on a petition and we need commitments to physically support us at the appeal hearing.

• If you care about downtown’s vibrancy, contact Sean.
• If you care about pedestrianism, contact Sean.
• If you care about community, contact Sean.
• If you care about your dog (or just like dogs, like I do), contact Sean.

sean.sweat@gmail.com
@phxdowntonwer
Facebook
817-223-4842

You can also contact me (Yuri) by email, Twitter, Facebook or at 480-319-2067

Public Hearing

Our appeal will be heard by the Phoenix Board of Adjustments this Thursday, November 4th, at 12:00 (noon) at City Council Chambers (round building at 200 W Jefferson St). Facebook event link.

Petition

If you haven’t had the opporutunity to sign the paper version in the past 3 weeks, and will not be able to attend the Public hearing in person, please consider signing this electronic version:

Petition for Public Dog Park in Downtown Phx

Other posts by downtown Phoenix advocates:

• Sean’s original post on Blooming Rock
• Tony Arranaga’s repost on Light Rail Blogger and his ‘Love Dogs, Not Cars’ Petition Tour
• Seth Anderson’s additional reasons to support the park: For the Love of Dogs in Downtown Phoenix
• Valerie Porter’s poignant letter to the City: Love Dogs, Not Cars – My Story