Parking - March 2010 - 18

Newstrack Winnipeg Downtown Parking Gets Poor Review A panel of parking and development experts from across North America has some harsh words for Winnipeg’s acres of downtown surface lots and some of its outdated and utilitarian parkades. Nine experts, brought in to assess the city’s downtown parking infrastructure and recommend ways to improve it, said many parkades and surface lots are not only “not in keeping with good architectural design,” but discourage nearby development rather than act as a catalyst for it. They said Winnipeg has too many surface lots and the city needs a strategy for redeveloping them. It also should consider establishing minimum design standards for parking facilities, start using parking to leverage more residential and commercial development in the downtown, and let its Winnipeg Parking Authority play a bigger role in downtown parking and development issues. The chief operating ofﬁcer for the WPA, which brought in the experts, said the panel will be submitting a detailed report within the next month or so. The WPA will use that information in formulating its new ﬁve-year business plan and parking strategy, which it hopes to present to city council in April or May. Concrete Industry Management Students Partner on Research Trip to Normandy A team of students of the Concrete Industry Management (CIM) program— a business intensive program that awards students with a four-year Bachelor of Science degree in Concrete Industry Management—traveled to France in September to continue concrete bunker evaluation and research at the World War II D-Day landing site at Pointe du Hoc, Normandy, France. Pointe du Hoc was one of the key locations for the historic World War II D-Day landing in June 1944. During their time abroad, the students learned ﬁrst-hand about historic concrete deterioration, state-of-the-art non-destructive evaluation, and about this important site and its history. Tanya Wattenburg Komas, Ph.D., director of the Chico State CIM program set up the research opportunity with colleagues at Texas A&M University. The team from A&M had been working for several years with the American Battle Monuments Commission on a project to survey the site and evaluate the cliffs of the historic landing site on which the concrete structures rest. The Chico team was invited to participate in the project in 2008 to do an initial assessment of the condition of the concrete structures and provide needed information about the depths of the foundations. The recent work focused on in-depth evaluation of six of the key structures, including non-destructive testing and laboratory analysis of concrete core samples, which will result in Historic Structure Reports for each of the structures. The project is planned National Parking Association PARKING March 2010
Parking - March 2010

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