ROANOKE, Va. – The City of Roanoke and PARK Roanoke held a public parking workshop Monday at the Berglund Center.
The workshop comes after a parking study was launched on October 15th that aims to assess parking conditions in the Downtown Roanoke and River’s Edge districts.
“We had an open house for the public to come in and just give us an opinion and how parking works for them,” Fishbeck Parking Consultant John Forster said. “Where they park, how they feel about things, and just talk.”
Survey takers are asked questions such as how often they visit certain areas, how easy it is to find a parking spot, and if an area needs more parking.
At the workshop, stations were available for people to leave their opinions and post comments on a wide range of topics.
Some people feel that parking spots are far and few in between.
“Of course, it’s frustrating,” Patsy McDonald said. “Then you have to go further and further away from your destination.”
Others think there is enough parking to go around.
“Usually, I find plenty of spaces in parking garages, and I think people look around for free street parking and don’t go into the garage,” Andy O’Brien said. “The garages are actually pretty cheap.”
Some people also wish Roanoke was a bit more walkable.
“The transit here is sometimes lacking, but I feel like it is a really bikeable city with great suburbs and a really great downtown and really great greenways,” Tobias Stewart said.
Fishbeck - the company tapped by the city to do the survey through an RFP- is hoping to take all of the opinions they gather to make people’s lives in Roanoke a bit easier.
“It’s the people that use it, it’s their car, it’s their life,” Forster said. “So we want to know what’s going on for them and how it works for them and if there are some things they want to see that’s a little different, what might that be.”
The ultimate endgame of the survey and workshop is to find new parking strategies in the short, mid, and long term while looking at how to improve the current parking situations.
The questionnaire is available until November 20th. The results won’t be finalized until several weeks after.