ITHACA, N.Y. — Campus Advantage has released revised parking numbers for its 11-story State Street Triangle project. According to newly-released documents here, parking will be handled with a “four-point program”:
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I. The primary component is that CA is negotiating a deal for 250 parking spaces in the upper levels of the Cayuga Street garage. The document notes an average surplus of 300 parking spaces per day.
II. The city is willing to let CA reserve up to 100 parking spaces in the Seneca Street garage.
III. CA has identified 75 underused spaces in the Green Street garage, but no formal deal is planned yet.
IV. Surface parking lots near Cornell and in other parts of the city that could handle parking for those who only need vehicles on weekends or for holiday trips.
Given typical student vehicle ownership rates of about 27% (27% of 620 = 167 spaces), point I will probably be enough to handle resident traffic. Commercial traffic, estimated to be about 64 spaces in the SRF Associates traffic study, would more likely be taken care of by point II or III. So the parking situation appears to be better thought out at this point. CA is also planning a bike share and an Ithaca carshare location. Whether it’s enough to please city staff, we’ll see.
The revised document notes construction traffic would enter the site from E. Green Street, and exit via Seneca Way and East Seneca Street.
Regardless, some of the reactions from city officials have been quite strong – the following quote comes from a report from 3rd Ward councilwoman Ellen McCollister from last month’s IURA meeting:
“Common Council may end up concluding it made a mistake when it re-zoned that part of the city without examining the issue more contextually and architecturally.”
State Street Triangle will be undergoing a public hearing at Tuesday’s city Planning Board meeting, and the committee will be going over the project’s City Environmental Quality Review forms. CEQR is the city’s more stringent version of SEQR, and is used to assess project impacts – basically, mitigating the issues created by the project, and making sure it’s a net positive for the community. No voting is expected.
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