Mailbag: “Those *@% parking ramps by the Guthrie!”
Posted on November 13th, 2008 – 11:42 PMBy Roadguy
I spent Thursday watching parts of the NTSB hearings on the bridge collapse, then it was off to St. Paul’s Union Depot for Design and Go. Until I get time to blog about the cool people I met there, here’s a little something from alert reader Eric, who says my most recent Sunday column struck a chord. I used the subject line from his e-mail as the headline on this post; here’s his actual e-mail:
Love your column. Normally I read about everyone else’s pet peeves and chuckle smartly, wondering why these people get so upset over little things. But then you wrote about the Guthrie parking ramps. And the rage I feel every few months during shows instantly grew. Seriously, are there more poorly designed ramps in the Cities?
These ramps are next to the Metrodome and Guthrie. It doesn’t take much insight to realize they will have frequent, event-type parking rushes where everyone shows up at once and tries to leave at once. Yet it feels like they were designed like a lot at the mall, where people dribble in and out all day long.
- The machines that take your ticket take 5-6 seconds to do ANYTHING: spit out a ticket, tell you what to pay or accept your credit card. Not a big deal when you’re by yourself, but multiplied by the pace of things at event parking times becomes an issue.
- Only a handful of ‘pay before returning to your car’ machines which creates absolutely laughable lines at the end of a show/metrodome event
- No ability to handle pay as you enter during event parking (your column today)–which is kind of a silly design choice, dontcha think, given the location/usage of this lot?
- No signage or communication to tell people they can pay with a card when they leave.
- On the city ramp next to the one across from the Guthrie (closer to Mill City) you drive on the LEFT side of the ramp to go up or down.
Seriously, I’m not sure if others will respond to your column today, but if so, I’d love to learn if the parking lot engineers of the world think these are all good, valuable, efficient improvements and how the city of Minneapolis contracted with the silly people who make these pay machines. Surely better technology must exist?
Thanks for letting me vent. But you probably get that a lot!
I do, but that’s O.K. — it’s my job.
7 Responses to "Mailbag: “Those *@% parking ramps by the Guthrie!”"
Is part of the problem the fact that they were going to be surrounded by The Revue condo project? It’s my understading that the homeowners were going to have spaces behind their units, much like they have in the Metropolitan Lofts. If that had happened, you wouldn’t have a “rush,” since there’d be far fewer spots for general parking.
Yes, “better technology” exists. Just go to the airport and park: insert credit card on the way in, reinsert on the way out and choose if you want a receipt or not. Slick!
@Art Yeah, even the ramp next to the Metrodome Holiday Inn (Seven Corners) has implemented the card in - card out system. It’s pretty slick, except for when the machine makes you listen to the entire British lady monologue before it reads your card.
They also block the view of the Guthrie. What a joke.
The Guthrie Ramp is also one of the, if not the, most debt ridden ramps in the city. The cost to build the ramp was very high (looks nice though) and the rates are controlled by the Guthrie. This ramp will not break even for many, many years. The City of Mpls tried to sell this ramp along with several others last year, no takers. No parking companies want to run this ramp. The City’s parking company, Ampco, is on its way out in April and the City may decide to operate their own ramps in the future. Before the new Guthrie was built it had plans to rebuild on its former site near the Walker. The City built a ramp (Vineland Place) near this site thinking the Guthrie would stay, they didn’t and the City is losing big on Vineland Place. Again, poor parking planning and loss of office occupancy downtown in the last 10 years has caused the city’s parking fund to evaporate. This is why they sold several ramps last year… yet the same people are still running the city’s parking system… good luck with that.
They could easily institute a flat rate, pay-as you-enter fee for events, but that would require the city to lose (gasp!!) a couple hundred $ in income because they’d have to hire attendants to man the entries.
Morg - I thought it was a fixed rate for Vikings games. They probably don’t do it for Guthrie events since, well, isn’t that pretty much every night.
