Downtown Parking Ramps Overwhelmed During Friday Night Live, 5K Overlap

WAUKESHA — The evening running of the Run With The Cops 5K, which launched from Veterans Park at 7 p.m. Friday, arrived on the same night as Friday Night Live's downtown block, and the two events together produced what city parking operations manager Sarah Chen described Saturday as "a genuinely interesting data point" for anyone who studies downtown traffic flow for a living, which she does.

Between 6 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., the city's two downtown parking ramps processed 340 vehicle entries, a figure Chen said exceeded her office's projections for the evening by 18 percent. The Main Street ramp reached its top deck, level five, at 6:40 p.m., twenty minutes before Chen's models had it topping out.

"We planned for Friday Night Live. We planned for the 5K. What we didn't fully model was the twelve-minute window where both sets of drivers were circling for the same forty open spots," Chen said.

"Basically Figuring It Out"

Downtown business owners reported brisk foot traffic paired with visible confusion. At Angelo's on West Main, general manager Ray Toffel said the restaurant seated a full patio by 6:15 p.m. but spent the next hour fielding questions from diners unsure whether their car was still legally parked, whether it had been towed, or whether they had in fact parked for the 5K and walked to dinner by mistake.

"We had one couple ask us to hold their table for forty minutes so they could go find their car," Toffel said. "It was in the Main Street ramp the entire time. They just couldn't get back into it."

One vendor working a Friday Night Live booth near the corner of Broadway, who gave her name only as Tammy and asked that her business not be named because she said she "didn't want to get anyone in trouble," offered a more general assessment of the evening.

"Everybody down here was basically figuring it out on the fly. Runners in ramps, ramp people on the race course, one guy asking me where the finish line was while I was trying to sell him a bratwurst."

— Tammy, Friday Night Live vendor

Routing Chaos, Familiar Flavor

Chen said the overlap was compounded by downtown's usual geography problems. Several out-of-town 5K participants, directed by a race map that assumed street parking near Veterans Park, instead found themselves funneled toward the East Avenue roundabout, where confusion over right-of-way has been a standing issue since the intersection's completion and where the city has floated awarding a "key to the city" to the first driver who navigates it correctly on the first attempt.

"We had race traffic hitting the roundabout at the same time as Friday Night Live traffic leaving early to beat the crowds," Chen said. "Neither group knew what to do with it. Nobody ever really does."

Downtown's one-way grid, which flips direction block to block along Broadway and St. Paul Avenue, added a second layer of difficulty for drivers unfamiliar with the area, according to Chen, who said her office fielded at least six calls to the non-emergency line from drivers who described themselves as "stuck" without being able to specify where.

No Repeat Planned, For Now

Chen said her office does not currently have a recommendation on whether to keep the two events on the same calendar date going forward, calling it "a scheduling question above my pay grade" and noting that Friday Night Live's dates are set by the downtown business association while the 5K's evening time slot was set by the police department's event coordinator earlier this year.

Both events are expected to continue independently next year. Chen said her office would recommend, at minimum, opening the third level of the Main Street ramp earlier in the evening "regardless of what else is going on downtown that night."

Toffel, for his part, said Angelo's plans to keep the patio at full capacity if the overlap happens again. "Good for business," he said. "Bad for anyone trying to find their car before nine."