BYLINE:    CYNTHIA TUCKER
DATE: May 4, 2005
PUBLICATION: Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The (GA)
EDITION: Home; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
SECTION: Editorial
PAGE: A19

The advocates of a six-story garage in Piedmont Park tout it as the solution to the district's traffic frenzy -- the parked cars that clog neighborhood streets and the (barely) controlled chaos that accompanies the jostling of automobiles, bicycles and baby strollers.

If they are right -- if an 800-car garage in the city's premier park will cure all those problems, then let's build parking decks everywhere. Let's stack one atop every MARTA station, hotel, hospital, park, school and restaurant within the city limits. Let's even tunnel under a few mini-mansions and build underground decks. That will really solve the traffic problem, won't it?

Sound ridiculous? No more so than the goofy argument the garage supporters are handing out: Parking decks solve parking problems. Really? So explain Buckhead.
The parking garage plan grew out of a one-sided partnership between the Atlanta Botanical Garden, which has long lusted after a deck, and the Piedmont Park Conservancy, which desperately needs the parking revenues. Still, a six-story parking deck is a peculiar idea for people who are supposedly dedicated to preserving green space.

Atlanta and every other Sun Belt city from Los Angeles to Orlando give the lie to the theory that it's possible to solve the issue of traffic and parking congestion by building more roads and more parking spaces. New roads and garages are the opposite of clothes dryers, where your socks are frequently kidnapped by forces unknown. Instead, cars self-multiply when you build more highways and garages. Park 10 in a garage overnight, and you'll have 15 in the morning.

Remember when high schools started offering a few parking spots to the handful of students who drove to school every day? Did those spots handle the demand? Of course not. More and more teenagers started to drive to school, and the parking lots had to become bigger and bigger.

Now, high schools cause such traffic and parking problems that the expansion of an existing school or construction of a new one often sets off a bitter neighborhood fight. Long gone are the days when school construction was greeted as an automatic neighborhood benefit.

Still, the garage advocates continue to press that discredited premise. Thomas Frolik, president of Buckhead's Neighborhood Planning Unit-C, said his neighbors support the parking deck because they live too far away from Piedmont Park to walk.

With the completion of the deck, more of Frolik's neighbors probably will drive to the park, along with motorists from around the city and metropolitan area. (Perhaps some of those park-lovers now take MARTA.) And when the 800 spaces fill, then what? Will the surplus drivers stay away? No, they'll jam neighborhood streets, just as they do now.

Garage advocates also claim the deck would increase access to the park and botanical garden for the disabled. Well, that's just peculiar.

Piedmont Park and the Botanical Garden already have parking lots tucked inside their green spaces. There is absolutely no reason they can't dramatically increase the number of parking spaces set aside for disabled motorists right now; all it takes is signage and a paint brush. No deck required.

Then, there is the carefully spun notion of the garden's gift of 15 additional acres, known as Storza Woods, to Piedmont Park -- a deal contingent on a parking garage. Well, that's awfully nice, but Storza Woods isn't the garden's to give. The tract belongs to the people of Atlanta, who have given the Botanical Garden a long-term lease. Its executives have no business holding the parcel hostage in return for a garage.

It may be too late to stop the construction of a parking deck. Mayor Shirley Franklin has given it muted support; last November, she said, "I hope [the deck] will be incorporated but not overwhelm the park."

So here's a prediction: Five years after the deck is built, city officials, garden supporters and park advocates will be wrestling with traffic congestion and parking-related woes. Highways and garages grow cars. Just wait and see.