Vacuum

Michigan Football spring game 2013: parking restrictions in effect

Michigan Football has its spring football game on Saturday, April 13, 2013. The following map shows restricted parking areas near the stadium for the event. Move your car - or the city will move it for you.

Public hearing December 7, 2011 to discuss increase of hourly parking rates in Ann Arbor

Notice of Public Hearing

Under Paragraph 8 of the City/DDA Parking Agreement, the public must be provided with an opportunity to speak at a public hearing before changes are made to hourly parking meter rates. A public hearing has been scheduled to elicit feedback on a proposed change to increase the hourly parking meter rate $0.10/hour, from $1.40/hour to $1.50/hour in September 2012.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 12 noon

Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority Office

150 S. Fifth Avenue, Third Floor Ann Arbor, MI 48104

Partial failure of retaining wall near Earthen Jar, Jerusalem Garden at Library Lot

A portion of a retaining wall failed on March 24, 2011 before 5:00 p.m. at the Ann Arbor "Library Lot" construction project, and Earthen Jar and Jerusalem Garden have been evacuated as a result.

Contractors from Christman, Soil and Materials Engineers, DTE Energy, and Doan Companies were on site at 9:00 p.m. to stabilize the sinkhole that formed when a portion of the retaining wall gave way. 

I spoke with senior project manager Adrian Iraola of Park Avenue Consultants, who got on site about when I did shortly after 5:00 p.m; he said that "any incident is serious", and reported that a portion of the retaining wall had broken as depicted in this photo taken at the site.

 

Via @mcburton:

I can confirm, the wall beneath Earthen Jar has collapsed a little. lot of people milling around.

The site is located at 319 S Fifth Avenue, on a block that also contains the downtown branch of the Ann Arbor District Library and the downtown branch of the University of Michigan Credit Union.

Previous incidents at the site include

• March 22, 2011. Teen rescued after falling into hole near University of Michigan Credit Union. (Ann Arbor Chronicle)
• March 8, 2011. Two steel workers injured after partial collapse of reinforcing steel. (Photos: AnnArbor.com)
• Late November or early December, 2010. Small breach in southern retention wall near Ann Arbor District Library; no injuries. (AnnArbor.com)

Two businesses are directly affected by this cave-in.

Earthen Jar, at 311 S Fifth Ave, is temporary closed due to the cave-in. Their web site has been updated.

Jerusalem Garden has also closed temporarily. A sign was on their door at 5:00 p.m.

Updates as they are available; as with all stories this will be updated before it's done, and some updates may take weeks should they require FOIA requests to be fulfilled.

The immediate aftermath, some days later:

The Ann Arbor Chronicle story of Sunday, March 27: "Column: Library Lot – Bottom to Top; A retaining wall breach; conference center idea could sink". Dave Askins speaks with a civil engineer and the project manager about the failure of the retaining wall; plus, reading the council tea leaves on whether the project will be approved.

The AnnArbor.com story of Sunday, March 27: "Ann Arbor conference center proposal: Some say it'll work, some say it won't, City Council must decide". The story runs with a photo which was taken before the retaining wall breach, and the story and its comments omit discussion of the wall and focus on the council decision.

Damn Arbor blames Cthulhu. "You heard it here first friends. All hail our new Mayor Cthulhu."

Update 3: add partial chronology 7:48pm. 3/24

Update 4: add jar, garden links 8:02 p.m. 3/24

Update 5: add J-G sign, accident 3/8, construction worker night photo. 11:22 p.m. 3/24

Update 6: add reverse angle pile closeup, update credits. 12:15 a.m. 3/25.

Update 7: add reference to 3d incident, 12:51 a.m. 3/25.

Update 8: Add Ann Arbor Chronicle, AnnArbor.com stories of 3/27; Damn Arbor from 3/24.

Edward Vielmetti likes the falafel at Jerusalem Garden and the okra at Earthen Jar. 16 CFR 255 notice: Ali Ramwali, owner of Jerusalem Garden, gave me a Turkish coffee once gratis (and it was delicious). 

Thanks to Matt Burton, Bill Merrill, Ryan Burns, Spencer Thomas, Kip DeGraaf, Lucy Ann Lance, Richard C. Adler, Kyle Mulka, Eric J. Klooster, Joe Minock, Stephen Clark, and the editors of Damn Arbor for their assistance in assembling this story.

a2b3 non-summary for Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010

Attendance: 19. I had the udon noodles, which are new on the menu at Eastern Accents and quite good.

My list of things to note from the day includes, but is not limited to:

• Google's proposed fiber to the home project, and how to get it to Ann Arbor
• Susan Crawford is back in Ann Arbor from a stint in DC and teaching cyber law
• I'm not sure that I wouldn't rather have a Droid phone than a Blackberry
• There is a super-nifty Droid app which is an exercise tracker w/maps
• Searching for low RPM motors that run on 2 AA batteries
• Next Tues.at Dow Aud. at UMHS a meeting on FDA regs for social media and medicine
• Census is hiring and training workers, $14-18/hr
• a2geeks
• Ignite 3 is coming up
• Earth Day is Garlic Mustard Day; I need your recipes
• next Tuesday is Paczki Day, I need your jelly donuts
• Ann Arbor Government Documents Repository continues to collect local govdocs
• Gelman Sciences has released some new docs on their pollution plume & cleanup
• Google Buzz is out
• the DDA is doing a survey on parking
• the hot pepper flakes are called "Ichimi Togarashi"

This list deserves hyperlinks; when I get them I'll go back and edit them in.

Thanks to everyone who came, see you next time.

parking lot indicators: art fair 2009

I've been collecting data on parking prices for Michigan football games in yards near the stadium for a couple of years now; the better the team is doing, the better the chance that the $20 parking turns into $25 parking, or $15 turns into $20. 

The one data point I have for Art Fair parking pricing for 2009 is that a lot near the new office is offering $15 parking, in a location that in previous years had fetched $20.

I got a ride on my way into Wednesday Farmers Market, and after the driver said the prayer to find a parking spot, we found one - right in front.

This has been a good week to take the bus.

records request: ann arbor downtown development authority parking data

update: broken links fixed to interview, thanks John Balogh for the heads up

as sent by postal mail and email

March 14, 2009

 

Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority
150 South Fifth Avenue
Suite 301
Ann Arbor, MI 48104

 

     RECORDS REQUEST

 

Dear Records Request Officer:

 

Pursuant to the state open records act, I request access to and copies of the continuously updated information about the current availability of parking structure occupancy and free spaces, as currently provided to the general public on the web page

http://www.a2dda.org/parking__transportation/available_parking_spots/

For your reference, this system is described in this interview

http://www.homelessdave.com/tt20080411stephensmith.htm

conducted by Mr. David Askins of the Ann Arbor Chronicle, in which a representative of a contractor for the DDA says:

"SS: Oh, okay! Yeah, no, I haven't had a lot of time to pay attention to our statistics yet, but I will at the end of this month. It just rolled out April 1st. Our area associations, I imagine, are going to want to embed this--and we encourage them to--in their own webpages. For instance, Main Street Area Association, and State Street Area Association. There are a lot of them, these associations and other organizations, who could really benefit from it, especially if you're going to have an event, you're telling your attendees to come downtown. "

Despite these assurances, our current requests are met with this error message:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /parking__transportation/available_parking_spots/
on this server.

---

Apache/2.2.4 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.4 OpenSSL/0.9.7a DAV/2 mod_jk/1.2.20 PHP/5.2.1 Server at a2dda.org Port 80

.

 

I am willing to pay up to a maximum of $20 in fees associated with the fulfillment of this request.

As the release of this data is in the public interest - indeed, is within the primary goal and charter of the DDA - I ask that these fees be waived.

 

If my request is denied in whole or part, I ask that you justify all deletions by reference to specific exemptions of the act.

 

Thank you for your assistance.

 

Sincerely,

 

 

Edward Vielmetti

Where is the nearest free parking space? How to fill parking structures at more than 85%

I stumbled into a world of "parking advocacy organizations" (trade associations for parking structure operators) and this video about how a garage in California is using per-space lights and sensors to speed up the process of people finding parking in a structure that's mostly full.

The parking rhetoric in Ann Arbor is that a structure is full if it's at 85% capacity, based on one consultant's recommendations.  I'd like to challenge that and say that no one really cares how full a garage is if you know that you won't be frustrated finding a space.

Here's a self-promotional news clip from Park Assist, the company in Australia that makes it, as printed in Parking Today:

Statistics show that 10% to 15% of the parking spaces in garages are not used, even when the garage appears full. In a parking structure such as Century City with 2,500 spaces, that means that at any given time, the garage could “appear” full, but it would have 200 to 400 spaces available. “You just couldn’t find them, at least not easily,” deWildt says. “It’s like we had built a 400-space garage.”

a2parking build notes

This page will have build notes for the real time parking system described in the Ann Arbor News on Friday, 16 January 2008.  I'm posting it incomplete now to make a URL that can go into print before the story is run.

UPDATE: the story is online; it references the link http://bit.ly/a2parking which points here.  Still working on the complete how-to so that you could do this yourself, if you happened to have a parking garage of your own.