Forum Committee Study Determines Freightway Garage is Underutilized

The Avalon in HarrisonIn an effort to get the ball rolling on the redevelopment of the Freightway site, the Scarsdale Forum’s Downtown Revitalization and Municipal Service Committee conducted an ambitious study over the last six months. Their goal was to determine the usage of the aging Freightway parking structure. The committee first requested the data from the Village of Scarsdale but were told “that due to a corrupted file, no data was available,” so they took the task upon themselves.

How to find out how many people were actually using the garage? Volunteers from the committee took turns doing a physical parking count beginning March 28, 2024 and extending through September 27, 2024. According to their report, “The counts occurred mostly Monday through Friday but were not conducted every day. …The counts occurred generally at the same time each day, approximately 11:00 AM.”

Now they have the data to begin their research and planning on what comes next.

Here is what they learned as written in a letter to Mayor Justin Arest:

"In total, parking usage for the six-month period was roughly and consistently approximately 50-60% of the 688 “official” spaces. This included a generally consistent 92-95 cars per day on the 83-space open lot, dropping to 72 cars in August. This exceeded the striped spaces but with valet parking was easily accommodated. It also included typically 250 cars per day in the garage (55-59% of capacity), almost entirely located on floors 1-3. Again, August was the slowest month with only 230 cars. The Beatty lot was consistently under-utilized with typically three cars out of 49 spaces. In terms of days of the week, numbers typically peaked on Wednesdays, flanked by Tuesdays and Thursdays, and trailing on Mondays and Fridays. Weekends were substantially less.”

“The garage generally maintained a fairly consistent 50-60% usage, though significantly dropping off on the weekends. During the week, typically floors 1-3 of the garage were filled, with the third floor essentially serving as “overflow.” The fourth floor appears to be primarily “storage” cars, with typically 20-30 cars parked daily even on Saturdays and Sundays when the lower floors had many open spaces. The fifth floor typically has 3-5 cars.”

As discussed in an article on Scarsdale10583 on September 10, 2024 the committee is calling for a reopening of the discussion about the crumbling garage and the site.

As background, the Village of Scarsdale engaged in an intensive three-year process to develop the site from 2017-2020, holding workshops, forums, surveys, walking tours and conducting research. Ultimately they solicited RFP’s from developers to build parking, multi-unit housing, retail space and other community assets on the site. But after considerable dissent broke out in the community the discussion was tabled in January 2020.

However, now the committee members believe it’s time to re-open the process, do more research, hold community meetings and begin planning for what could be a five to ten year project.

Why do they think that this might fly now despite the failure earlier on?

First, the garage is beyond its useful life and the Village has budgeted between $550,000 and $916,000 to shore it up over the next five years. Since the garage will continue to deteriorate, some believe this is throwing good money after bad.

Another new factor is the decrease in demand for the parking spots since the COVID epidemic changed commuting patterns. Many more people are working remotely or doing only part-time work in the city. Though the parking spots were previously coveted, now demand has fallen off. If a garage is to be re-built, how big should it be?

The original proposal failed partially due to fear about traffic and overcrowding of the Scarsdale Schools from multi-unit housing. However, the committee believes these fears were exagerrated and that there would be only a marginal impact to school enrollment from the addition of one and two bedroom units. They would like to see these numbers re-examined along with a study of how development in other towns along the Metro North corridor affected school enrollment.

Therefore the committee’s August report called for the trustees to re-examine the project, consider multi-unit housing and modify zoning as needed. The recommend that the Village “reassess the impact of multi-unit housing on the School District and propose limits on unit sizes and occupancy to avoid negatively impacting the schools.”
Whether or not the trustees will seek to revisit this controversial proposal is yet to be seen.

Read the full report here: