plate V only by the addition of a grilled wall, and in some instances by the development of the ground-floor frontage for store space to increase revenue.
Functionally appropriate and capable of pleasing architectural treatment, the openwork walls of the parking stories eliminate the necessity of mechanical ventilation, which is essential in underground and closed-building facilities. Thus these self-ventilating facilities reduce the costs of vehicle accommodation.
A further development, the addition of upper stories for certain office and loft uses, might produce additional revenue which would permit the reduction of parking charges to a practicable and generally attractive minimum.
Reduction of the prevailing rates of structures of this type is necessary before these off-street facilities can offer the prospect of a solution to the general parking problem. While they are now usually operated at reasonable profit, this is possible only at parking rates which exclude all but a small percentage of the vehicle owners who must in the future be induced required to use off-street accommodations.
In a studied development and location of facilities of the type last described, the Committee sees what it regards as the most promising prospect of a completely satisfactory solution of the parking problem. A number of these parking garages, for instance, each within two or three blocks’ walking distance of the destinations of their patrons, are to be preferred to few larger facilities more distant from the travel objectives of those who must somehow and somewhere be accommodated.
In this connection, the provision of express highways which will concentrate the approach of a large volume of traffic to the business center at a few points, somewhat complicates the problem of distributing the traffic to its eventual convenient places of off-street parking.
Any attempt to discharge the free-flowing express traffic at one point into the surface streets of the downtown section, through such streets to find its way to distributed parking places, is likely to create an exit confusion and delay that will cause at the end of the express route a loss of much of the time saved by the free movement en route. Such an attempt, moreover, may cause a degree of congestion in the surface streets near the express highway terminus greater than that resulting from the present distributed approach of vehicles.
Termination of the express highway in an open square or plaza, a solution that has been suggested, is certain to encounter troublesome difficulties in channeling traffic through or around the plaza to and from the several connecting streets, and may still throw congesting volumes of traffic upon these streets at the approach to the plaza.
A wholly satisfactory termination of express highways in large cities will probably not be found short of the provision of a limited-access distribution route located circumferentially about the central business section. With traffic interchange facilities at selected streets on the fringe of the business section, such a route will so distribute the discharge and collection of express highway traffic as to (1) minimize the effects of entrance and exit delay upon the flow
