The Airdrie Downtown Parking Study that began in 2016 and was added to last year will go with the Downtown Plan Project to make Airdrie's downtown a more vibrant place, and with better parking in all sectors of it, according to the Manager for both projects.  

Karl Mielke recently presented the parking study to Airdrie City Council for information.  He says the study area for the parking study was virtually the same as the working boundary for the new Downtown Plan.  For the parking study, they asked the consultants who undertook it to study several different aspects of downtown parking for the city.

"To take an inventory of all on-street and off-street parking spaces in the downtown, as well as a demand analysis to see how many of those stalls are being used at various times of the day and throughout the week.  We asked them to look at parking duration as well, and to make any recommendations for how we can manage parking in the future."

The consultants determined that Airdrie has three peak periods for downtown parking.  On Thursday the peak period is from 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm.  On Friday it's between 5:00 pm and 6:00 pm and on Saturday it's between 12:00 pm and 1:00 pm.  Mielke says the Thursday peak period is when it was the busiest, but busy is a relative word.

"At that time," he says, "we were only using 59 percent of our on the street parking stalls and 52 percent of our off-street parking stalls in the downtown."

Obviously, says Mielke, that means there is ample parking in the downtown area.  The question it doesn't answer, 'is there parking in the right places?'

"We don't always have the supply in the right places.  The area between Centre and Second Avenue can actually get quite congested in terms of parking and we receive legitimate complaints about that area.  The parking study did find that those are areas where the parking usage exceeded our acceptable threshold levels. Essentially we have an excess supply of parking throughout most of the downtown, but specific areas where we don't have enough parking available.  That's something we'll have to address in our downtown planning."

Mielke says they aren't endorsing any of the recommendations in the Downtown Parking Study because management of the downtown parking supply has to be tied to the vision of the downtown that the community gets behind.

"We're going to look at what comes out of the Downtown Plan design charettes and the whole public engagement process.  Once we have a clear vision of where the community wants the downtown to go, then we'll look at how to effectively manage parking to achieve that vision."

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