Let The Whining Begin! Parking Downtown Kalamazoo for Ribfest

If I hear "I would go to that but it's downtown and there's no place to park" one more time I won't be responsible for my actions.  We were downtown for the Food Truck lunch Sunday at Arcadia Festival Place (btw there should be a lot more people taking advantage of that. It was great) and that very subject came up.  Why do people continue to whine about parking downtown Kalamazoo?  In 28 years I've never NOT found a reasonable place to park.

Guess what?  You probably won't be able to park right in front of your destination!!!  In the bigger cities and other college towns people know they're going to have to walk a couple blocks or more.   Is that too much to handle?  What do you do in Chicago?  Or even Grand Rapids?  Call a cab or Uber after every stop?  It's insane the mentality and/or laziness of people making this excuse.  Frankly, I think there's plenty of places to park and don't we want a "walking downtown"?

I started ranting back in the early 90s that downtown Kalamazoo needed to be less retail and more entertainment and look at all the entertainment we have today.  Now that the malls and traditional stores are getting hurt by online shopping we need added retail.  But cool retail that people want to come downtown for. Ya know, like for college kids; there are 25,000 of them afterall!!! And for crying out loud, can a store stay open past 6pm.  How are people who work till 5pm supposed to shop???  I'll save that for another time.