New Parking Decks Planned

Two Areas Set For Downtown To Solve Growth Problems

Construction crews work Wednesday on the parking deck for the 21c Museum Hotel on Northeast A Street in Bentonville. The structure is scheduled to open in the spring. A second parking deck is slated to be built in the Midtown Shopping Center.
Construction crews work Wednesday on the parking deck for the 21c Museum Hotel on Northeast A Street in Bentonville. The structure is scheduled to open in the spring. A second parking deck is slated to be built in the Midtown Shopping Center.

— As downtown Bentonville continues to grow, city leaders are looking at ways to maximize parking. Two planned parking decks around the square will provide some answers, though a city planner said it will still be difficult to meet parking needs during popular downtown events.

The downtown area has 658 public parking spaces and 14 motorcycle spaces. There are also hundreds of spaces in privately owned lots. The largest of these lots, the Midtown Shopping Center on Northwest Second Street, will be unavailable as the property is redeveloped starting this summer.

The city will lose about 160 spaces during the transition period. When the new center opens, a parking garage in the planned development will have around 250 spaces.

The parking lot will be on the northwest corner of the new Midtown Shopping Center, facing Northwest A Street, according to large-scale plans submitted to the city.

Daniel Hintz, director of Downtown Bentonville Inc., said the group is working with businesses that use the parking lot to find parking for their customers during the transition.

“We’re working with small businesses like Flying Fish to understand how we can help them to develop a strategy to inform their customers where they can park,” Hintz said.

One component of that strategy is to provide public parking maps created by the Bentonville Convention and Visitors Bureau and highlighting wayfinding signs around town that mark public parking areas.

The 21c Museum Hotel on Northeast A Street will have a parking deck for its customers and neighboring Arvest Bank when the hotel opens in the spring. While the lot won’t serve the general public, it will take cars off the streets driven by those working at or visiting the bank.

Troy Galloway, director of community development for the city, said the city’s public spaces are more than adequate 95 percent of time. It’s the peak periods such as First Friday events on the square or the Christmas parade that provide a problem.

“At key events like First Fridays, we’ll probably never ever have enough,” Galloway said.

Hintz said the First Friday events draw an average of 4,000 to 5,000 visitors to the square a month. The 658 spaces aren’t enough and visitors park at local churches, on side streets and in business lots.

“As new parking assets come on board and more traffic comes into the downtown area, we have to look at how we collectively work to bring efficiency to the management of parking,” Hintz said.

While visitors to downtown may have to park several blocks away from a downtown event, the city has invested in infrastructure to make walking around downtown part of the experience, Hintz said.

“A lot of the credit goes to the city for continued investment of the streetscape and their plans to click and drag the vibe of downtown, the sidewalks and the light poles down those side streets,” Hintz said.

Small businesses in the area have also contributed to make walking from parking lots more enjoyable, Hintz said. Restaurants have open-air dining that energizes the street, while ground-floor retail establishments give pedestrians an experience while walking to their destination.

Hintz and Galloway both stressed one word — free. No local groups have put forward plans to create a paid parking situation downtown.

“Our philosophy is to provide as much free parking as we can,” Galloway said.

By The Numbers

Downtown Bentonville

Public Parking Spaces Downtown: 658

Average First Friday Visitors: 4,000-5,000

Source: Staff Report

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