Our love affair with the
automobile depends on one thing: free
parking. After driving on our “free”
highways, we have to park someplace, and we all hate to pay for the privilege. It’s as if there’s some constitutional right
to free parking.
But free parking is actually
expensive and paid in more than just dollars.
The industry standards
setting group known as the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) has
defined 266 different types of businesses and has determined the amount of
nearby parking they require. So when
your local Planning & Zoning Commission is looking at proposals for, say, a
new restaurant, they consult the ITE manuals on what parking would be needed.
Mind you, a fast food joint
like a McDonalds will require less parking than, say, a fancy steakhouse, given
the number of patrons and how long they stay there. But when it comes to the rules of parking,
we’re talking about more than restaurants.
Consider convents. For
whatever reason the ITE’s “bible” says religious convents must have one parking
space for every ten nuns or monks in residence.
Hello? They’re in a religious
retreat! They’re not going
anywhere! Wouldn’t it be smarter for the
convent to be able to use its land for better purposes than an empty parking
lot, like growing its own food?
Or how about hotels? Their parking regulations are based on the
assumption that they are sold out, something that may not happen very
much. Wouldn’t it be easier for the
hotel to make special arrangements on those sold-out nights than have acres of
asphalt baking in the sun most of the year?
Drive up the Boston Post Rd
and see the bitter fruits of this short-sighted planning. Thanks to zoning regulations a lot of big-box
stores devote 60% of their land to parking and 40% to the stores themselves. Just think of what that means to how they
price things. Isn’t it any wonder that
Amazon can compete on price?
Awhile back I drove through
New Britain where I once lived. I hardly
recognized the downtown with its empty stores and sidewalks next to a ten
storey parking structure. They “built
it”, but nobody came.
If you look at the
communities with the liveliest downtowns you’ll see people, not cars. People attract people as they go into shops,
walk along and window-shop. It’s
pedestrians we want, not parking lots.
UCLA’s Donald Stroup wrote a
great book, “The High Cost of Free Parking”, and made his point with a tale of
two cities:
A decade back both San
Francisco and Los Angeles opened new downtown concert halls. LA’s included a $10 million, six storey
parking structure for 2100 cars. But in
San Francisco, they built no additional parking, saving developers
millions.
In LA after a concert the
music-lovers scurry to their steel cocoons and drive away. But after a show in San Francisco, patrons
leave the concert and stroll the streets, spending tens of thousands of dollars
in nearby bars, restaurants and bookstores.
Guess which city’s economy has benefited most from its investment in the
arts.
The buzzword these days in
Harford is TOD, Transit Oriented Development.
By putting stores, mixed use office buildings, housing and amenities
near train and bus stops, people will use mass transit to get there instead of
their cars. That doesn’t mean we don’t
need parking at train stations. But even
a parking structure can have stores at street level.
City planners need to
remember that human beings come with two legs, not just four tires.
Reposted with permission of Hearst CT Media
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