Of course, what will happen is, visitors to GPAC, especially out of town visitors which the GPACers are promising to attract in droves, will not know their way around downtown Greensboro and become confused as they drive around searching for the scattered parking spaces and making the 1000 cars added to downtown appear to be 10,000 cars as evidenced by the GPAC parking map: (Click on the map to enlarge.)
Then there's that increase in the cost of downtown parking fees. That cannot be good for downtown restaurants and shops that already claim to be struggling to compete with shopping centers, malls and big box retailers who all offer free parking. The result will be the closing of downtown shops, restaurants and businesses. I'm predicting the first business to close will be the Flatiron, which is especially sad for me because while I'm not much on going to bars, the Flatiron's owners, staff and many of their patrons are all people I care about, some I have known personally for a very long time. Guys, I hope to finally make it back up to the mountain this year as I've been away too long. I wonder if that's what that key on my keychain goes to that I haven't used in years...
Where will people going to Nico's and other downtown restaurants for dinner park? At Eric Robert's old mill perhaps? Knowing Eric and knowing what a great guy he is, I'm sure he'd be happy to help out and the exercise would do us all good but let's face it, most folks aren't walking 3/4 of a mile to get to a restaurant. I mean, it's only a mile from Downtown Greensboro to the nearest grocery store and already downtown residents are bitching that's too far.
And then we come to the real writing on the wall: In response to the then failing downtown business environment developers will again begin another push for the City of Greensboro to fund more downtown parking garages at taxpayers' expense. And so begins the 4th round of taxpayer funded downtown Greensboro rejuvenation in my lifetime and nothing has changed.
Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results. Maybe, just maybe, I'm not the crazy one.
