Gainesville’s Parking Wars

It’s Parking Wars…of a different kind.

There’s a really disturbing trend that’s starting to arise in pretty much any part of Gainesville, but is becoming especially evident on Archer Road east of I-75. If you’ve noticed lately, the old Wendy’s on Archer is going to be renovated and a new burrito/Tex-Mex place is going to be placed right next to it as well (it’s not one replacing the other as I first thought). If you have an idea about the size of the lot that these two fast-food places are going to be on, you’ll realize how cramped these two businesses will be. The lot was meant to be strictly a parking lot for Wendy’s patrons…and then it turned into an (unofficial) overflow lot for Chick Fil-A. (The lot, for comparison’s sake, is about twice the size of the Chick-fil-a parking lot…not that big).

Really, Gainesville city planners?

It’s bad enough that Butler Plaza is a freaking maze to get through…it’s like the predecessor to Waterford Lakes down in Orlando…too big, too many stop signs, too many three-way intersections that confuse the living crap out of people, and you really do feel like you might get into a major accident when you want to go from Barnes and Noble to Best Buy (something I do on a somewhat regular basis). Five Guys on Archer, while popular, is still not in a good position to welcome a maximum number of customers because the parking situation there is absolutely horrendous. Getting into and out of the parking lots in that strip is just a nightmare, at best. The Gainesville Sun did a wonderful article on the whole ordeal at the Five Guys on Archer just last year.

But of course, Archer Road is just one of the many problems that this town/university/city/county(?). You and I both know that the University is pretty, well, interesting when it comes to parking. I can’t say with certainty that we don’t have enough parking spots…we kind of actually do, they’re just not in the right places. Park and Ride never really reaches full capacity at its heaviest times (it gets quite close), but then we have that satellite lot across 34th on Hull Road as well. We don’t have so much a parking crisis as we do a parking nuisance (UCF has a crisis that’s being slowly mitigated one monstrosity of a parking garage at a time). Most of the chatter comes from East campus, and rightfully so. There’s a whole lot of student housing density on that side, and from what I can guesstimate…there’s really only about 400-500(?) Red/Red 1 parking spots east of Newell. (By student housing I mean Beaty/Jennings/Rawlings/Broward/all of Sorority Row).

The rest of metropolitan Gainesville doesn’t do that much better. Ever trying parking around Midtown/College Park? You either end up parking on UF property (which is fine at night, but at lunch time it’s luck of the draw), or you end up parking six/seven blocks from all the attention that Midtown brings. This’d be fine if crime was better controlled up there, but as far as I know robberies and muggings are quite common on that part of town if you go just one block too north. Downtown Gainesville isn’t any better…overall, the parking situation’s fine, but the vast majority of open spots are located a good two blocks away from everything else in Midtown, an area that might make some people uneasy walking around there. True Midtown is probably the worst…I am conflicted when I feel like going to Gator Dawgs, Karma Cream or Kabab House because I end up either paying for a meter or just ignoring it altogether since I have to weave my way through some alley just in hopes of parking.

In other words, I hope that the Gainesville City Commission can stop poking their noses around fraternity houses’ walled parties  and actually do something about a situation that affects all of us Gainesville-ites.