All of that concrete and asphalt also aggravates the city's Heat Island Effect, a phenomenon Louisvi

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It wasn’t so long ago that downtown Louisville was a quiet, out of the way place most residents rarely bothered to go to. Unless you were an office worker or conventioneer, the Central Business hotels near toronto airport District did not have much to offer. In those days, a causal visitor would only find a few restaurants, a museum or two on West Main, and the cultural institutions like Actors Theatre hotels near toronto airport and the Kentucky Center for the Arts — all of these separated hotels near toronto airport by blocks of abandoned hotels near toronto airport buildings, vacant storefronts and empty streets.
Today, downtown could not be more different. Ignited by a national renewed interest in urban living and fueled by a mixture of basketball, bourbon and local food, downtown has become an exciting and active 24-hour community. Whether seeing the Cards play in the KFC Yum! Center, eating delicious food at a restaurant in Whiskey Row, touring an artisanal bourbon distillery on Main Street, or shopping at a local retail store on Fourth Street, downtown hotels near toronto airport is becoming the  place to be in Louisville.
The Central Business District’s progress was halted by the Great Recession, but it s clear the downtown real estate market is finally coming back to life; seven new hotels, two full-scale bourbon distilleries, apartments and retail space are either planned, under construction or nearing completion. Now, after so many decades of being quietly irrelevant, downtown’s future is looking bright. But as downtown has continued to make progress, an issue that plagued urban areas for decades has once again reared its ugly head: parking.
Figuring out where to put parking has been a challenge to city planners hotels near toronto airport since the car was invented. The problem of parking came to head in the dark days (for the city) of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. As the population left the city for the suburbs in droves, political and business leaders looked for ways to keep the urban center relevant in an increasingly suburban world. Their solution (in keeping with national trends) hotels near toronto airport was to tear down the city and rebuild it to imitate the suburbs.
While the city was transformed, the strategy ultimately failed as a way to keep downtown competitive with the suburbs. In fact, according to  one study conducted hotels near toronto airport by urban policy researchers Norman Garrick and Chris McCahill last year, increasing the supply of parking actually has a negative impact on the vitality of a Central Business District.
In urban areas, space is scarce; hotels near toronto airport a portion of land in the average CBD can only accommodate a limited hotels near toronto airport number of uses. When large portions of a downtown are cleared for parking, land uses favorable to people (residences, shops, etc.) are displaced and shift to the suburbs.
What Garrick and McCahill’s study found is that this process has a profound effect hotels near toronto airport on both the population of a city and its transportation habits. They examined changes hotels near toronto airport in parking hotels near toronto airport supplies for six cities since 1960 and compared them to overall driving rates and changes in population.
They found cities that continually increased their parking supplies saw the number of people and jobs drop by as much as 10-15 percent, and saw median income drop by 20-30 percent. However, hotels near toronto airport one variable did increase: driving rates. Commuting increased by as much as 30 percent, and even small trips within the city increased by 45 percent. In comparison, several cities in the study decided to stop increasing their supply of parking in 1980. Those cities saw the number of jobs, people hotels near toronto airport and median income all climb in the intervening years.
The message is clear: Increasing the supply of parking succeeds only in pushing more people into the suburbs, who then start to drive more. The increase in the number of drivers creates more demand for parking, thereby pushing civic and business leaders to clear more of the city to increase supply.
It’s a vicious cycle that ultimately turns a Central Business District into little more than an urban office park, dark and empty after hours. It is best summe d up by William Whyte in his book “City: Rediscovering the Center”: “If you tear down enough of your downtown for parking, pretty soon there won’t be any reason to go there and park.”
Louisville did not escape this phenomenon, and the current landscape screams the results. The map above illustrates hotels near toronto airport just how much parking has been created over the last 50 years. According to an article from Brokensidwalk.com , at least a third of downtown’s total surface area is occupied by parking — both surface lots and single-use garages.
All of that concrete and asphalt also aggravates the city’s Heat Island Effect, a phenomenon Louisville  is struggling to mitigate . Anyone unlucky enough to have had to park on one of the downtown surface lots on a hot summer day can attest to this fact.
But most importantly, an excess of parking can have a significant impact on the ability of a Central Business District to thrive economically. Land is a limited resource in urban areas, therefore hotels near toronto airport it must be used wisely hotels near toronto airport to ensure productivity is maximized. When a particular parcel is occupied by a surface lot or single-use garage, it generates little revenue-producing activity. No jobs (outside the occasional parking attendant) are being created, hotels near toronto airport no goods are being bought or sold, and the land is economically vacant in addition to being physically empty.
The public sector loses here as well, because those same parcels dedicated to parking don’t generate any tax revenue. The city of Hartford, Conn., for example, hotels near toronto airport loses $1,200 per parking spot per year , which totals $50 million a year in lost tax revenue.
Lee Weyland of City Properties Group  shared some insights gained from his company’s multiple development projects in downtown. While parking does present its challenges in an urban context, he says, “It is ultimately a necessary commodity for any downtown, and Louisville is no exception.”
According hotels near toronto airport to Weyland, the Parking Authority of River City (PARC) has kept parking rates low compared to many peer cities, and that has given the Louisville an advantage hotels near toronto airport in attracting signature, higher density development projects.
The key, then, to solving downtown s parking problem hotels near toronto airport is not figuring hotels near toronto airport out how to eliminate parking; instead, the question we should be asking is, “How do we redevelop and redesign existing parking infrastructure to have positiv