Quote Originally Posted by DetroitPlanner View Post
Your making a lot of simplistic assumptions there. The turning radius of a person is different than that of a car. In downtowns, you have a greater percentage of workers who use public transit or carpool because of the economics involved with paying to park. One cube to one space is not realistic Some businesses are destinations and need a lot more spaces than others. Compare the traffic generated per employee of someplace like Galaxi Solutions to the Hard Rock Cafe across the street. One has dozens of visitors per employee, the other might go weeks without having a large meeting.

The bottom line is that transportation is not a simple thing. The land uses surrounding the location as well as the type of business it is has a lot to do with how much traffic it generates. After you define these things then you need to work on modal splits [[who drives, who walks, who takes the bus?). Are there economic barriers such as $20 per day parking that need to be overcome?
I'm talking about ballpark sizes of garages for offices.

If you want to get more specific you can.

The Penobscot Building is 776,000 square feet. If you go with 300 square feet per worker [[including that worker's share of the communal spaces), then the Penobscot Building can hold about 2600 office workers. The Compuware garage is 2200 parking spots. Even if I'm way off and the Penobscot Building only needs half as many parking spots as I estimated, that's still a lot of parking.

My point was though, was that there's nowhere near enough parking directly in the financial district for all the buildings there, but the buildings are all generally doing ok. Someone else said that a lot of the buildings actually do have their own spaces, which is true, but they don't have anywhere near enough spaces for all of the workers, and most people have to walk a few blocks. If the parking was the deal breaker this guy is making it out to be, those other buildings would all be failing, but they're not.