The new public parking garage at 4th and Walnut streets, which opened in late August of 2021, has a lot of unused capacity.

That’s based on entry/exit and occupancy data for the first half of 2022, which was provided to The B Square by the city of Bloomington in response to a records request.

For the first six months of 2022, the peak occupied state of the garage came on June 22 between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. when 315 cars were parked in the garage—based on the numbers provided by the city. More typical peak occupancy for a weekday is around 150 cars.

The reports generated by the parking system software show the capacity of the garage at 500 spaces, but during the design and approval phase for the garage, the number was pegged at 537 spaces. A manual count by the B Square this week put the number of total spaces at 560.

Based on 560 spaces, a typical peak occupancy of 150 on any given day works out to about 27 percent. A conventional parking industry benchmark is that 85 percent occupancy is perceived as full.

The garage replaced by the newly built structure, because it was failing structurally, had 352 spaces.
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