ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[plam]

One of the things that's stuck with me was an argument made about Yorkdale mall. The argument was that some of the parking lots should be removed to allow for residential towers to go up on the site. But the response was that even getting into dozens of stories of height, it was a net loss to see howevermany public parking spaces become tower+private parking spaces (or just tower, if you assumed you could sell a no-car development at that location). The 500-1,000 sqft apartment/condo buys groceries once a week, but the 3-6 parking spaces you can fit in that space turn over many times every day, generating far more sales. Now, depending on your beliefs, transit users can have a similar sales effect, depending on how far they're willing to struggle with their goods to get home, but the point sticks, that you really do need not just the eyes on the street and comfort of knowing you aren't in a dead, uninhabited zone, but you also need the ability for far more than just a localized population to be able to fill and support that area.

But are those Yorkdale parking spaces currently used in non-peak times?

For malls, the equation is different. Malls are destinations, and the oft-quoted numbers are for street-level merchants.

Yeah, street traffic isn't helpful for non-malls. May be more helpful for malls. Except the ones that don't manage to actually act to attract people, like downtown malls around KW for some reason.

My unresearched-but-verifiable-by-data hypothesis is that the effect is more pronounced for small businesses at street level than it would be for complexes. I'm not sure that it's terribly big of an effect, though, as the amount a household spends a month is somewhat fixed. What could be changed by this sort of thing is _where_ that spend happens, not _whether_ it happens or not.

I would also like to have data. Speculating, I could imagine that lower gas spending could increase spending on other things. But then there's the third-order effect of less spending on cars in the economy in general.