Public Policy Of Parking
No one who has studied urban planning in the 20th and 21st century has anything good to say about cars.
However, vehicles with internal combustion engines are better than the horse drawn wagons and buggies that they replaced. Horses came with tons of manure, flies, feed, and stables. The auto pollutes with gasoline and oil not to mention the need for gas stations and repair shops. One redeeming thing for the horse-drawn wagon was that its owners did not just leave the horse at the curb all night…unlike car owners.
According to CNN, there are 2 billion parking spots in modern America. It is estimated that there are 276 million registered vehicles and 552 million parking spaces in commercial lots alone. That doesn’t cover parking garages, airports, stadiums, or other large institutions.
In New York City, there are 1100 dedicated public parking garages and 300,000 free curbside spaces. The number of concrete and blacktop areas creating heat islands is raising the temperature just so that we can park at any store and business we visit. In places like Florida that have substantial rain, storm water runoff becomes a problem.
And yet we continuously hear from some that they can’t find a parking space. When what they really mean is they can’t find a parking space for a store or restaurant directly in front of where they want to shop or eat.
For years, people have wanted a garage downtown where I live in Stuart, Florida because there are so many restaurants and stores there. Well, it looks as if they will finally get their wish. In conjunction with the new Brightline train station, Stuart will be constructing a new garage as part of the transit area. Most of the $15-$20 million cost should be covered by grants.
Stuart, that has a budget including utility and enterprise funds of just shy of $90 million, could never afford to have this garage without different state and federal grants. Perhaps with the increase in parking demand because of the station, it is necessary. However, I suspect that it will remain empty of Downtown shoppers and restaurant customers. Being a few blocks away from Downtown, people won’t park in the garage and walk or take the parking tram.
The garage is being constructed on the site of an existing parking lot which is now empty in the evenings. Stuart has what many other areas around the country have…a perceived need for parking, not an actual one. The parking garage will be 4 blocks away from the heart of Downtown. That in the minds of many is too far to walk.
This phenomenon is not confined to Stuart. And that is why most of our newer cities are nothing more than suburban malls tied together with the moniker of being a city but those built prior to World War II are full of on-street parking. We have now reached the breaking point for city planning but much more importantly for the environment.
Going back to the 1960s, city planners knew that the car was bad. Some, like Robert Moses, murdered neighborhoods with multi-lane highways cutting through them. Those same highways took the middle class from cities to suburbs and created new towns without a center. Just subdivisions of homes without souls.
All of this was fodder for more cars that need parking spaces because without driving, residents cannot buy groceries or eat in a restaurant. It is called sprawl.
We are still recovering from the hollowing out of city centers due to car culture. We need to go back to a time when mass transit was looked on as the necessary and preferred public conveyance. Going forward, cars should not have the prime importance they still hold today.
