Would someone help educate me to the concerns surrounding parking garages in a lower density area? Are there examples of this in OKC? When is it cost effective? Are garages obsolete with the trend towards "new urbanism" and alternative transportation?

http://chi.streetsblog.org/2013/10/11/traffic-aside-does-a-parking-garage-build-livable-neighborhoods/

Pros:
More visitors
Higher density
Get cars away from the sidewalks

Cons:
More traffic
Noise
Appearance
Cost

newcastle and winstar casinos have garages. at least winstar made an effort to hide thiers. newcastle's look fugly from the highway, detracts from the appearance of the casino grounds, though I get why they did it. just need to design it to keep the visual appeal where it needs to be. IMO _ALL_ parking garages should have mandatory ground-level options for the pedestrian. Doesn't have to be retail, can be art, showcases, or something otherwise interesting. But the pedestrian experience shouldn't be getting bullied around as much as it is. I'm not at all saying down with all parking garage (though that would be nice in a future world of utopian transit). I've advocated on a number of occasions putting in a garage in the Plaza, so long as it was visually unobtrusive and properly incorporated the street/peds.

Would someone help educate me to the concerns surrounding parking garages in a lower density area? Are there examples of this in OKC? When is it cost effective? Are garages obsolete with the trend towards "new urbanism" and alternative transportation?

http://chi.streetsblog.org/2013/10/11/traffic-aside-does-a-parking-garage-build-livable-neighborhoods/

Pros:
More visitors
Higher density
Get cars away from the sidewalks

Cons:
More traffic
Noise
Appearance
Cost

I'm coming at this without any formal training in urbanism (i.e., I haven't read all the prominent books). But I think my primary concern would be overbuilding unnecessary infrastructure. While I'm not convinced that Uber/Lyft are with us for the long-haul, I am increasingly convinced that Google, Tesla, Uber, Amazon, and/or many others are going to figure out the problem of autonomous or self-driving vehicles. From there, it's no stretch to see that combined with car-sharing. If that comes to pass, the end result is many many fewer cars in circulation. Think of it - right now we probably each own at least one car. If you're (un)lucky, you use it a couple hours a day. That's so much wasted value sitting there. I think economic forces will push individuals away from car ownership and to car sharing, especially once the guy behind the wheel is technologically obsolete. In that world, we'll still need garages to store the remaining cars, we just won't need as many. So while there's a place for these sorts of garages, we just have to be careful not to build too many of them, or we'll have a bunch of white elephants in the year 2050. And that would have a negative impact upon these neighborhoods.

I'd also say that there are parallels for this sort of thing in recent history. Plaza is thankfully thriving today, but that was an unloved semi-commercial strip for decades because it was originally built for a mode of transit (streetcars) that died out. When the transit model changed, that commercial infrastructure was no longer viable. Same thing is noticeable with roads/bridges in rural areas of the Plains states. States built out huge highway networks (and counties in some cases big networks of paved roads), and we're now seeing that with rural depopulation, these pieces of infrastructure can't be maintained forever. We're still trying with the bridge thing, but I already know of a few cases in Oklahoma where some smaller counties are turning paved roads back to gravel, because grading is a cheaper process than paving. But maybe these possibly overbuilt garages will find their own Plaza-type renaissance. I could see the hipsters of the year 2057 going to a hot new outdoor industrial style bar/loft in a repurposed parking garage from 2017!