We're so inundated with parking concerns and the rhetoric of parking anxiety in this country and in the city of Hartford that its hard to remember that parking is even an issue, that is, something that can be debated and altered. 'Free parking' is often seen as the #1 key to a healthy business environment, but history tells a different story, of the timed parking meter coming from merchants to deal with the issue of what they called "over parking," rather than just a random punishment from revenue-hungry city governments. "Underwhelming parking" from too few visitors to the city in "overwhelming lots" is a good way to describe what happens in Hartford these days.
In a paper he and colleagues presented this week in Buffalo at the Congress for a New Urbanism meeting titled "Visualizing Parking Ratios," Garrick translates his team's findings into visible and striking displays that can help us to conceive of what our city looks like compared to other cities. In their short paper [pdf link here, 9 pages] Garrick et. al. also provide helpful tables of comparison bewteen 1960 and 2000 parking levels for the cities of Cambridge, MA, New Haven, CT Hartford, CT and Berkeley, CA. It is striking to see Hartford and New Haven's parking space numbers tick up dramatically while the other two cities' parking supply stays relatively constant. You can feel and imagine the changes in infrastructure that are happening in these cities during this time with the Connecticut cities devoting more and more resources to roadways and parking with very little investment in alternative transportation modes while Cambridge and Berkeley were building robust bus, pedestrian, and bicycle networks.
In the paper they presented this week, the authors sum up these trade-offs that have brought us to a situation in the city of Hartford where it seems difficult, dangerous, even absurd for many people to consider walking or riding a bicycle on city streets:
"Parking demand also varies considerably depending on access to transit and rates of walking and bicycle use, among other factors(Rowe, McCourt, Morse, & Haas, 2013). In fact, rates of automobile use by commuters ranged from 55 percent in Cambridge to 85 percent in Hartford in 2000, according to the U.S. Census.However, our prior study focusing on those two cities suggests that the substantial increase in parking in the latter city has likely played a large role in driving up automobile use there (as in many cities),especially for local trips once made by walking, biking, and public transit(McCahill & Garrick, 2010). Similarly, parking availability was found to influence rates of driving among similar neighborhoods in New York (Weinberger, Seaman, Johnson, & Kaehny, 2008).By placing greater emphasis on policies that encourage residential development in CBDs and travel by non-automobile modes, the need for parking can be greatly reduced." [link to pdf for entire document]
Justin Eichenlaub is a member of Transport Hartford. He lives in Hartford's South End.