Wichita City Hall wrecked parking downtown, and neither mayor candidate quite gets it | Opinion
At Monday night’s mayoral debate, I asked a question about downtown parking to get an idea where our two candidates, incumbent Brandon Whipple and challenger Lily Wu, stand on the frankly outrageous price increases and inconvenience of the new parking system around Century II.
I didn’t expect to hear that we just need to get used to walking more, or that the new system with its mobile app and QR code scanning is somehow easier and better than dropping a couple of quarters in a parking meter.
But I did.
So here’s some of what the two candidates had to say, and I’ll unpack it after:
Wu — “We have to think a little bit differently And walking in our community needs to be something that we need to start getting used to. It is good to walk and when we think about parking in the downtown core, there are places to park, maybe not as convenient as others would like. But when you think of a big city and a growing city like ours, parking lots take up real estate that could be used for those grocery stores that people keep talking about. So we need to think about parking in a smart and effective way, but also think about different ways to approach parking and walking because I believe that Wichitans want to be part of a growing city and that requires us to think like a bigger city, and that is sometimes parking that might be just a little bit further away.”
Whipple: “We had to modernize our public parking because, frankly, our meters — people, they’re not, you know, carrying a roll of quarters around with them . . . The thing is not everyone has the luxury of walking. The people who I hear the most pushback from when it comes to changing these plans are older folks — folks who like to go to the shows at Century II and they are hesitant to put their information or a credit card into a cellphone because they’re the targets of scams. . . . I want to walk more, I want to look better, I want to get my steps in, don’t get me wrong. But not everyone I talk to in Wichita has that luxury, so what can we do to also accommodate them? And I think it’s not too much to ask to keep a lot, you know, with the older technology going as we transition over.”
Parking for profit
The root problem here is the hazard of privatizing government services, which City Hall is hell-bent on doing.
Now, like Century II itself, the parking is managed by private companies and the overarching goal is profit maximization.
ASM Global runs the entire facility and hired two subcontractors to manage the parking, so there are now three corporate bottom lines that have to be fed.
But the simple fact here is that the people of Wichita paid for the parking lot long ago and have been feeding the meters there for decades. We own that parking lot. We shouldn’t have to keep paying for it, over and over, now at $5 to $20 per use.
Whipple was exaggerating when he talked about people having to carry rolls of quarters for parking change.
Until earlier this year, it was two quarters for four hours. “Modernization” is now costing users 10 to 40 times that.
Whipple’s suggestion of putting in a kiosk to take actual cash is a worthy one, but that still doesn’t justify the unjustifiably high price increase.
As for Wu’s comment, I’ll say this: I’m from a big city. I lived in Los Angeles from 1977 to 1998. Parking was one of the worst things about living there, so I can’t quite figure out why we’d envy that.
But in LA, At least I understood why parking downtown was expensive and often a long walk from wherever you needed to get to. There wasn’t much of it and hundreds of thousands of people were trying to use it at the same time.
Be it noted that Southern California has the most temperate climate in the country, so it was never too cold nor too hot for walking.
That’s just not the case in Wichita.
I expect there will be a lot more backlash about scanning those QR codes when the ice is on the ground, it’s 5 degrees outside and the wind’s blowing 25 mph.
And I can’t walk away from this issue without pointing out the patent absurdity of blaming a lack of developable land for the lack of a downtown grocery store.
Literally across the street from the Century II parking lot is our so-called WaterWalk, a fail-whale of a project that the city invested $41 million in, and which still has enough vacant space to build several grocery stores.
Or somebody could have put one in the former Gander Mountain building, a wide-open retail space that’s now essentially a call center for a truck-dispatch company.
Here’s some free political advice for our candidates:
When Wichitans go somewhere, like a show at Century II, the overwhelming majority have to drive there and they want parking that’s reasonably proximate and reasonably priced.
That didn’t used to be a problem.
For some reason, it is now.
And the candidate who commits to figuring out a way to fix that would get themselves a long way toward being our next mayor.
