Knowledge District can’t grow fast without parking

Before office workers, students and researchers can fill the former Interstate 195 land and drive development of the Knowledge District, someone will have to build a large place for them to park.
That’s the conclusion I-195 Commission Chairman Colin Kane has reached after studying the parcels his board has been tasked with redeveloping and receiving estimates of a parking shortage in the former Jewelry District of 2,000 to 4,000 spaces.
“Providence is a car-centric city and we need a large parking solution,” Kane said recently about the I-195 lands. “It will probably be multiple garages over several years: parking is a municipal investment. The first question I ask if I am an office tenant is, ‘Where do I park? It drives projects.”
Since the economics of multilevel parking garages are difficult, Kane said parking development will probably require a mix of state and federal dollars to fund the kind of high-volume facility, such as those at the Capital Center, that can allow the rest of the land to be developed to its highest and best use.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean one of the 23 former highway parcels tabbed for development will have to be sacrificed for a multilevel parking garage.
With an estimated 15 acres of surface parking lots in the former Jewelry District alone, Kane figures that some parking can be consolidated into one or more larger garages, as long as the government is willing to invest in it.
And the parking doesn’t have to be adjacent to each building it is serving. Busses, shuttle busses or the proposed streetcar line that many support to bolster the city’s limited mass-transit system could all be valuable in solving the transportation needs of what is anticipated to be more than 2 million square feet of new development.
“If we can centralize that parking, then the streetcar could be part of the transport solution,” Kane said.
To figure out how to tackle the parking problem, the I-195 Commission is looking to put together a comprehensive transportation plan that will calculate in further detail what kind of traffic should be expected in the district, how it will move, what mass-transit options exist and what the best way to provide parking will be.
The consultants the commission has employed to work on permitting, environmental and engineering on the I-195 land, Fuss & O’Neill Inc., also did the preliminary parking analysis that arrived at the 2,000- to 4,000-space shortfall. Fuss & O’Neill civil engineer John Chambers said only seven of 23 parcels in the I-195 district had enough space for a commercially viable building with onsite parking.
The high water table in the area near the river and fact that all of the soil is believed to have some environmental contamination make extensive underground parking decks impractical, Chambers said.
Although mass-transit supporters point to the large cities with office buildings thriving without dedicated workforce-parking spaces, commercial real estate experts agree that, at this point at least, companies are not ready to commit to offices in Rhode Island without it.
“There must be some parking within a reasonable distance,” said Jeffrey Butler, president of Butler Realty Group in Warwick about I-195 development. “Whatever the solution is, [the I-195 commission] will have to go out into the market with the problem already solved.”
The Knowledge District is expected to gain some on-street parking when the R.I. Department of Transportation rebuilds the street grid in the former highway area.
At the urging of the city, DOT has agreed to make streets wide enough to accommodate on-street parking, either on one side or both sides, wherever there is enough space for it.
That could provide parking for new stores and restaurants in the area, but is not a solution for office workers.
Work on the new streets is scheduled to begin next spring and last into 2014.
As for how the importance of parking might favor one use of the highway land over another, Butler said research and development space is generally slightly less parking intensive than traditional offices, and residences require even less parking.
In addition to future demand for parking on the west side of the river, Kane said the highway land on the east side could also require parking solutions. He says the Fox Point riverfront area, home to restaurants and bars now, has the potential for significant growth.
Once the transportation study details the parking need and best options for dealing with it, Kane said it will be time to engage city and state leaders.
“We need to demonstrate why this is important and what the expectations of the marketplace are,” Kane said. “Parking in some ways is like having adequate water and sewer service, it is a public utility.” •