I suggest emailng each of the tenants about how paid parking is going to discourage you from becoming a patron, and copying the landlord. This way the landlord gets the pressure of knowing the tenants are going to be pissed off.

$3-5 on top of the already $25 lunch at Hopdoddy? Pass.

I'm a professional making a comfortable 6 figures. As cliched as it sounds, it's the principle of the thing, in this case.

The restaurants there are fine, but not remotely worth the extortion--oops, parking fee. And as so many have said, there are plenty of (better) places with free parking.

When does the lazy river from the garage to the restaurant go in?

#takeakneeforfreeparking

Don't even suggest it or cocs will want to connect it to wolf pen drainage ditch and swamp hole. Next would be Brazos transit wanting to connect it to their federal boondoggle woodlands water transit.

Just like how I refuse to pay cover, I refuse to pay to park unless there is no other option.

We'll see how this plays out, but I think (and I've thought this from the beginning) that the developer (and Sharp) are over estimating the area.

Agree to an extent.
Most people don't want to park in a garage and walk 1/4-1/2mile to their eatery/shopping (especially if they can't see the store accords the lot.).
Even if they made the upper garage spaces free, that's still waiting on an elevator or a walk up/down stairs.

And the student thing has been dealt with before even closer to campus.
Add in the prices for the bar there so far etc and it seems like they expect(ed) something like midtown/uptown/west-u whetebits a trendy area that people are willing to travel to and spend money.
In this town just going from southwest parkway to villa Maria is "too far".
They might pull off the gameday stuff, but I doubt it.
Most departments aren't going to pay for parking in top of taking a visitor out.

Again, we'll see how this experiment plays out.

75AG said:

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CactusThomas said:

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Century Square is a bad idea to begin with. Free or not, I'm not parking in a parking garage to get a burger or see a movie. This isn't NYC.

"Who do they think we am?" - Dale Watson

As someone else already mentioned, grub is very comparable - if not better - and it's hassle free.

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Thanks for not going there. Century Square ain't for your kind

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Ha! Maybe it "ain't for his kind", but apparently it's not for at least 90% of the people now that this has happened. And I really don't see the businesses surviving on the other 10%. But good luck on whoever you are associated with there

The parking is a huge issue. It's tone depth for the town.

FlyRod said:

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I'm a professional making a comfortable 6 figures. As cliched as it sounds, it's the principle of the thing, in this case.

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We're all millionaires here on the internet.

They did this at City Centre albeit a much slower process and a much more densely populated area.

City Centre opened around 2008 and didn't start the parking mess until 2016/17.

The problem is they targeted fast casual restaurants and then cut their knees off with parking charges completely taking away the "fast" part of fast casual.

CactusThomas said:

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birdman said:

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If you validated parking, then you are fine.

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Still not worth the hassle in my opinion.

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Getting parking validated is not that difficult. You can probably get it validated sitting on your ass in the restaurant.

Will be very interesting to see how this plays out.

It is one thing to add parking to a few of the premium spots around the green after the development is fully occupied and the centre is humming.

Adding paid parking to a 15% completed development with a few fast casual concepts is just a complete miss by the developers.

I think an interesting point has been brought out in this thread -- that other developers will be watching.

Seems like if you don't want to see Bryan and College Station turn into the kind of place where paying to park is accepted practice, then this is larger than just Century Square. It's about sending a message to any developers who might be itching to try it with their own projects.

I don't want to see that be the norm around town, so not only will I not go there, I will be proactive and tell my friends and family why it's in their best interest not to do any business there, either.

All this is really not difficult to understand. Consumers realize that it costs to build parking (or provide debit/credit card services or extra ranch dressing or ice water or etc.). All most in this and many other markets ask is that the cost of these amenities and services be incorporated into the menu or product price (implicit cost to consumer). Then the meal/drink/product just has to be good enough to justify that price.

Consumers generally get upset and it hurts businesses when they nickel and dime us over and above the listed price (explicit cost to consumer). Just give us one price.

In this case, Century Square should have figured the cost of the parking lot into the restaurant/store leases. Then those restaurants/stores can figure those costs into menu prices. Then it is up to both Century Square and its tenants to guard that parking with lookouts, signs, and towing, and figure the cost of that into menu/product prices.

Way too many other options for restsurants in BCS without pay parking

I'll pass

I wonder if the people who contributed money to help fund the upcoming Porters steakhouse at Century Square would have been so eager to contribute had they known parking was going to be paid. During the Nextseed campaign, people specifically asked about parking as a concern and were assured there were over 1,200 parking spaces to be "shared among the commercial uses". No mention that this was going to be paid parking was made:

https://www.nextseed.com/offerings/porters/#comments

If any of you contributed funds to the Porters campaign, I would encourage you to contact Nextseed to explain that you feel you were deceived about the viability of the restaurant given that it turns out parking is not going to be free.

Unlike other tenants, Porters appears to be at least partially owned by Midway, the developers of all of Century Square.

FlyRod said:

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Quote:

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We're all millionaires here on the internet.

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Nope, just you. Managing a Sonic has obviously been good to you.

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All kidding aside, you'll never see fast food and other high income casual restaurants do this. They pull in the income through the price of the meal. It's just a bad idea for this market.

But, as we've seen time and again, many people don't understand the retail environment in our little neck of the woods. The biggest mistake I've seen made over the years is judging the CStat market by itself, without taking into account the Bryan population and the outlying counties who use BCS as a retail and commerce hub.

Quote:

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Way too many other options for restaurants in BCS without pay parking

I'll pass

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Bottom line, nicely summed up.

If I'm understanding the KBTX description of how it works, for me, the charge is one problem and how they are implementing it is another... unless I'm not getting how a tenant/restaurant can validate parking for their customers.

The $3 is for the first hour. If you have to prepay, you have to guesstimate how long you're going to be there, right? So it's really more like $5 or more if you want to be safe on a meal that would take an hour, which is long for the fast casual, but not excessive for dinner at a nicer place. Similarly, the upper level is only free for 30 minutes.

LMFAO at paying to park and then eat in College Station, Texas.