Is the shopping mall dying?

By Peter M, on July 15th, 2012

The indoor shopping mall turns 60 this year, but an Atlantic Cities article questions whether it’s dying:

At the mall’s peak popularity, in 1990, America opened 19 of them. But we haven’t cut the ribbon on a new one since 2006, for reasons that go beyond the recession.

Not a single new mall in the whole of the USA opened since 2006. That’s quite amazing. And by the sounds of it many of the existing malls are struggling to survive too:

By Dunham-Jones’ count, today about a third of our existing malls are “dead” or dying. That’s not to say they’re mostly vacant. But they have dreadful sales per square foot. High-end dress stores have moved out, and tattoo parlors have replaced them – “things,” Dunham-Jones says, “that would normally be considered way too déclassé for a mall.”

About a third of our malls are still thriving, and those are the biggest, newest ones. But America is no longer building many new highways, which means we’ve stopped creating prime new locations for mall development. Some of the earliest amenities of the enclosed mall – air-conditioning! – no longer impress us. And the demographics of suburbia have changed dramatically. Malls draw the largest share of their customers from teenagers, and the baby boomers who largely populate suburbia no longer have teenagers at home.

So what’s replacing these malls? Well, often it seems that we’re seeing something of a return to traditional style “main street” shopping, but within more mixed-use developments known as “lifestyle centres”. The article goes on:

… the suburban mall of Gruen’s plan appears to be victim of more than just the recession. Dunham-Jones, who has tracked this trend in her book Retrofitting Suburbia, estimates that more than 40 malls nationwide have been targeted for significant redevelopment. And she can count 29 that have already been repurposed, or that have construction underway.

In 2010, Columbus, Ohio, tore down the dead mall in its downtown for a park. Voorhees, New Jersey, demolished half of its dead mall, built a new main street and relocated its city hall into the remaining building. In Denver, eight of the area’s 13 regional malls now have plans for redevelopment. One of them, in suburban Lakewood, was converted from a 100-acre super block into 22 walkable blocks with retail and residences.

“It’s the downtown that Lakewood never had before,” Dunham-Jones says. Ironically, this is what Gruen had been aiming for. “Except that now it’s open-air.”

Americans haven’t particularly outgrown the consumer impulse that Gruen detected. We still love to flock to dense agglomerations of Body Shops and Cinnabuns and Brookstones. But now those places look increasingly like open-air “lifestyle centers,” with condos above or offices next door. Some of these places are just the old mall in a new Main Street disguise. But when you add residences, and cut Gruen’s mega-block into what actually looks like a downtown street grid, that begins to change things.

“You’ve got to get a mix of uses, but the connectivity is probably even more important,” Dunham-Jones says. “The uses will come and go over time, but if you can establish a walkable network of streets, that’s when you’re really going to establish a ripple effect in changing suburban patterns.”

Of course the City Rail Link project means that Westfield’s downtown shopping mall will need to be demolished. This is great as the mall is a pretty hideous building on one of Auckland’s best pieces of land. But elsewhere in Auckland it doesn’t really seem as though we’re following the USA’s trend. Within the land few years we’ve seen Sylvia Park and Albany malls open, two of Auckland’s biggest, while big redevelopments of both 277 Newmarket and St Lukes are on the cards to occur in the next couple of years.

I suppose this begs the question of whether Auckland’s fundamental retail environment differs from the USA, or whether they’re just a little ahead of us in the trend and it’s an inevitability that we’ll start to see a “post mall” retail environment. I certainly hope so, as long as it’s something better than the “mega centres” we often see sprouting up around shopping malls (yes I’m looking at you Wagener Place, St Lukes!)

Tags: , , , , | Category: Planning | 33 comments

Albany Park & Ride to be Expanded

By Matt L, on January 13th, 2012

Auckland Transport have announced that they will be doing a major upgrade to the park and ride at the Albany busway station starting in February and going through to July and this upgrade is pretty significant as it involves doubling the number of carparks at the station to 1100. At first this seems great, adding more car parks will allow more people to use the station however this doesn’t come cheap as the work is expected to cost $5.5m for those 550 carparks which is about $10,000 per carpark (more on that soon).

Here’s AT’s press release and an image of what the carpark will look like.

Auckland Transport is set to begin a major extension of the Albany Park and Ride facility that will see the number of current parking spaces doubled.

The $5.5 million project, which is due to begin in early February, involves a large extension to create an additional 550 parking spaces, bringing the total capacity to 1100. (Click to enlarge map, JPG 3MB)

The facility is part of the Northern Busway initiative which was New Zealand’s first purpose-built road dedicated to bus passenger transport. It forms a key part of Auckland’s Rapid Transport Network whilst improving journey speeds and reliability. ​

The busway provides an attractive alternative to private vehicle use and promotes the use of multiple modes of transport.

The Albany Busway station car park first opened in November 2005 with 370 car parking spaces. An additional 181 were added in May 2007 to meet demand.

Auckland Transport says the 2012 extension provides further evidence that the Northern Busway has significantly changed the way in which people in the area travel.

A sculpture designed by renowned Titirangi artist, Caroline Robinson will also be built on site. The seven metre high limestone tower represents the artist’s impression of the car park’s location near Lucas Creek.

Work is expected to be completed by the end of July 2012.

Now back to those costs, as I said it works out at $10,000 per carpark which is a hell of a lot of money to spend just so an extra 550 can park their car for the day. Even if every single space was used each day for 20 years it still works out at a cost of around $1.36 per day however that doesn’t take into account a lot of factors, looking more closely at how frequently it would be utilised, adding in opex costs and applying a discount rate gives us a massive cost of about $1.94 per trip, you can see the workings here: Albany Station P&R costs.

So what other options do we have, one thing we could do with that money is to buy a number of buses and run them as feeder services to and from the station, $5.5m is enough money for about 4 buses and 4 full time drivers each being paid about $50k per year for 20 years. This is of course a very basic calculation and doesn’t take into account a lot of other costs but lets look at how many people that could deliver to the station. Say the buses only ran at peak times, only did 5 runs per peak period with each bus run carrying an average of 30 passengers per run, that gives us 600 trips per peak which is already more than is provided for by the parking however that amount of money would allow the buses to run for much of the day which means that potentially far more people would be able to use the station than could have otherwise and those services have the potential to provide more local trips as well.

One thing that isn’t often thought about is the cost of the land, for that the councils GIS viewer is a very handy tool as it can give us the rateable land, the highlighted land in the image below is the corner of this new section of Park & Ride yet the land alone is valued at over $2.7m (you can see the existing entrance in the top left hand corner).  It isn’t clear if the land costs are included in the development cost or not but either way it is still a very expensive way to provide some car parks for what will become a very limited number of people.

One other thing to consider is that Auckland transport is currently in the process of creating a new station at Silverdale with its own associated Park & Ride, that development has the potential to take a decent number of the cars that currently use Albany out of the car park freeing it up for others who live in the area.

In saying all of this, for Auckland Transport, I do think it is a bit of a case of damned if you and damned if you don’t,  people will always complain that there isn’t enough parking, or at least not enough free parking yet at the same time others like me get annoyed about how much is spent just to store some cars for the day when that money could be used to give access to potentially a lot more people and not just those that can or want to drive to the station.

With this now going ahead anyway, one final thing I think should be considered is the idea of making part of the car park user pays. What AT could do is section off the closest 300-400 car parks to the station and charge a fee to access them, that would mean that the best spots, closest to the station would be available should people wish to pay and for those that don’t they can still use the free section and walk a bit further if they can find a space. The cost of the paid section could be adjusted over time to ensure that on average there was always a set amount of parks free for those that absolutely need them during the day. This would at least help to recover some of the costs and if done at the same time the new section opened would allow AT to say that even with the new pay scheme there were still more free spaces available than there were before.

Tags: , , , | Category: Buses | 53 comments