It's a bit odd that I'm typing this from the Jersey Turnpike, which I suppose is a kind of parking structure today, but the Courant has an interesting piece about Hartford's extreme complicity in its destruction by car-suburbia.
One would have thought that New London would be the champ of the car-centric, pointless, and failed development league's Conn. division, but Hartford seems to have topped it through sheer perseverance.
UConn professor Norman Garrick and doctoral candidate Christopher McCahill write:
This summer the Center for Transportation and Urban Planning at the University of Connecticut conducted a detailed study of the cumulative effect on the city of 50 years of providing parking. What we found was startling: Since 1960, the number of parking spaces in downtown Hartford increased by more that 300 percent — from 15,000 to 46,000 spaces. This change has had a profound and devastating effect on the structure and function of the city (see accompanying maps) as one historic building after another was demolished.
And what did the city gain from this assiduous drive to provide sufficient parking? Was it able to grow more prosperous by providing more jobs and housing for more people? If this was the desired outcome, we can consider the past 50 years to have been an abysmal failure. Over the period that parking was being increased by more than 300 percent, downtown was losing more than 60 percent of its residential population, and the city as a whole lost 40,000 people and 7,000 jobs. (emphasis mine)
What's interesting about the starting date of 1960 is that it's pretty much coincident with Jane Jacobs's work on what cities do and don't need. Of particular relevance to this topic is that they don't need urban highways and more cars. Garrick & McCahill point out that even Hartford's planners noticed the downward spiral over the years but never took any action. The outcome is was predictably bad:
In 1978 the city council went further in expressing its strong support for a moratorium on construction of parking garages in the central business district. But we were able to find no evidence that any such forward-looking idea was ever actually implemented in Hartford. Fortunately, there are some clear lessons from a handful of cities nationwide that did understand the price of destroying value to accommodate parking. These cities embraced ideas to curb the voracious appetite of the automobile for space. Cities including Cambridge, Mass., Portland, Ore., Washington, D.C., and Seattle developed policies to limit the amount of parking, to re-convert parking land to productive use, and to increase walking, biking and transit use for people going to work.
The contrast between, Say, Portland and Hartford is stark in terms of economic vibrancy and social vitality. Hartford looks more like the hundreds of other American cities that have hollowed out their core to accommodate automobiles.
This study has particular relevance because the hollowing out continues today. At both the local and national level, the car-suburbia complex has a very loud voice. Beyond the disastrous car manufacturer bailout, there is the allocation of transit infrastructure money in the stimulus. Most is for car-centric projects, and the majority of that is for sprawl-centric projects:
The stimulus law provided $26.6 billion for highways, bridges and other transportation projects, but left the decision on how to spend most of it to the states, which have a long history of giving short shrift to major metropolitan areas when it comes to dividing federal transportation money. Now that all 50 states have beat a June 30 deadline by winning approval for projects that will use more than half of that transportation money, worth $16.4 billion, it is clear that the stimulus program will continue that pattern of spending disproportionately on rural areas.
In other words, instead of fixing the economy, the states are using the stimulus to create tomorrow's foreclosure disaster today, and just hoping that the urban theme park model (h/t Atrios) will work out. The snag being that it's ineffective stimulus, since, for all their problems, cities are the thing that generates the economy. The Times again:
“If we’re trying to recover the nation’s economy, we should be focusing where the economy is, which is in these large areas,” said Robert Puentes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, which advocates more targeted spending. “But states take this peanut-butter approach, taking the dollars and spreading them around very thinly, rather than taking the dollars and concentrating them where the most complex transportation problems are.”
The 100 largest metropolitan areas also contribute three-quarters of the nation’s economic activity, and one consequence of that is monumental traffic jams. A study of congestion in urban areas released Wednesday by the Texas Transportation Institute found that traffic jams in 2007 cost urban Americans 2.8 billion gallons of wasted gas and 4.2 billion hours of lost time.
It's not like somebody predicted, oh, 50 years ago or so, that this could end poorly.