Coatesville and Phoenixville have different parking problems

Coatesville has an enormous amount of unused metered street parking on Lincoln Highway in the three blocks east of the downtown area in Coatesville. It’s an easy one to five minute walk to the downtown area.

It’s personally frustrating to hear arguments over zoned parking for businesses because I know the zoning parking regulation Coatesville uses is based on zoning that is designed for new suburban land accessible only by motor vehicle.

Chetty’s Pennock Place building is not at Third Avenue and Lincoln Highway because of the cycle of events after Andrew Lehr’s insistence at a Coatesville City Council meeting on March 27, 2006 that the suburban parking zoning be followed exactly before Council would approve it. Chetty did not get the “Conditional Final Approval” that Pulver’s Marriott Courtyard Hotel recently did get. The clock on Chetty’s development plan ran out and the months long delay to get back to final approval was enough for Chetty to lose the deposits on condos, his investors and eventually the entire project. That’s even though the target occupants of “Pennock Place” would have no more than one car and would use the new train station.

If you want to see a perfect example of what Coatesville would look like if all of Coatesville’s downtown business area had the kind of zoning parking regulations Coatesville uses for new commercial zoning drive on down to “Main Street at Exton”.  

Coatesville’s actual parking problem was the abuse of hourly parking by certain “connected” people who had a sort of immunity from tickets. That is, the tickets went away in Magisterial Court frustrating the officers who ticketed the vehicles. That problem has been mostly cleared up.

Phoenixville has lots of people who want to be in downtown Phoenixville. It’s a different kind of parking problem that Coatesville desperately needs:

DAILY LOCAL NEWS

Talk continues on parking issues in Phoenixville

Published: Thursday, April 14, 2011

For basic information on land development, read “Saving Pennsylvania; Save our Land, Save our Towns” or “Save our Land, Save our Towns” it’s the same book with slightly different titles. It’s in our libraries. If you still have a VCR there is a videotape of the original PBS TV show in our libraries also.

 I’m leaving it to the USDoJ to sort out why Lehr didn’t go for conditional and final approval and if it had something to do with the “alleged visit to Chetty Headquarters in December of 2005”.