By Carla Howie
Diane Williams, of Business District Inc., asked the pivotal question to the 40 people who attended the Downtown Zionsville Parking Study and Market Analysis, “How do we get those who come downtown, to stay downtown?”
From the numbers that were shown, parking is underutilized. According to Peter Lemon of TADI, turnover, or the change in parking during the course of the day, was about 2.3 hours per stay mid-week and 1.6 hours on Saturday mornings.
Lemon explained that a utilization percent of 85 indicates maximum efficiency in parking and anything over that percent reflects an inconvenience to the customer. The highest percent of utilization produced was 63 during the noon hour midweek and 51 on Saturday at 10 a.m. The percentages decrease thereafter.
For several reasons, those who shop or dine downtown don’t stay. Of the 901 survey respondents, 25.6 percent dine downtown in an average month, while almost 50 percent spend $75 or more on meals outside of the home in an average week. Nearly 80 percent said they would spend more if there was a larger variety of stores from which to choose, such as specialty food (prepared or ethnic) stores, and if there were longer shopping hours. Of the seven days, the survey defined Saturdays and Sundays are the most convenient days to shop; 78.5 percent and 68.1 percent respectively.
Attendees were asked to view the survey comments of three areas: strengths, challenges and opportunities, and identify if they were accurate and provide additional feedback. The majority of the discussion in each group appeared to have a central theme: to keep the unique and authentic setting “on the bricks” while developing a strategy to stay competitive and capable of differentiating their product or service.
To add some levity at the end of the meeting, participants submitted a “headline” of what Zionsville could become. “Zionsville, healthiest town in Indiana,” “Zionsville Central School Volunteers Town Cleanup,” “Zionsville – All Open on Sunday,” and “Charge Your Electric Car Free While Downtown Zionsville.”
Charlie Edwards, president of the Economic Development Commission stated, “This ushers in Phase II of the project and results of this evening will provide additional data for the steering committee to develop the strategies on how to move forward and how the business snapshot should look five to10 years from now.”
The final presentation should be available mid-February, 2014.
