Ask most veterans of revitalization initiatives, or any stakeholder (property or business owner) in one of Ohio’s downtowns, and they’ll tell you that parking is at or near the top of the list of concerns for their business district.

It goes without saying that parking a car is an essential part of downtown, and that the parking experience needs to be as easy to complete as possible to encourage traffic to central city merchants and service providers. It does not necessarily follow, however, that prime corners of downtown real estate should be sacrificed for surface parking. Such is a current controversy in Ravenna, county seat of Portage County, where the Record-Courier has reported on statements of a local attorney that he would consider demolishing a 154-year-old building for surface parking or a parking garage should he be unable to sell the structure. The story quotes the owner as saying, “What better place to have a parking lot than on the corner of Main Street and Chestnut Street? I am getting tired of the historical things around here."

Effective parking strategies for downtowns in Ohio are possible without losing important historic resources. One downtown revitalization expert has developed an approach to the issue that he calls “Smart Downtown Parking,” a concept based on seven underlying principles grounded in the idea that the best parking is one which is “…planned, designed, and located intelligently.”

Planning for parking tends to be an ongoing task. Downtown advocates in Newark, for instance, are currently considering requesting a change to increase metered parking limits from two to three hours, reasoning that shoppers likely to spend large amounts of money tend to do so over a longer period of time.

Photo: Michael Klassen/Creative Commons License