We want our cities and towns to be welcoming, pleasant places where people enjoy coming and spending their time. Connecticut, along with much of New England, takes great pride in the character of our main streets, town greens, and public spaces. We have built much of our civic life there — fairs, events, and public gatherings that remind us how incredibly charming our little corner of the country can be.
For all the appreciation we have for these places, however, many of our cities and towns look and feel much different from that idyllic image. Instead of quaint, charming little town greens with shops, cafés, and a gazebo where the town troubadour plays folk music, we often end up with large oceans of concrete clogged with cars. Instead of sidewalks, parks, and outdoor seating areas, we have wide, multilane roads packed with traffic. Instead of cafés and cozy diners, we have fast-food joints surrounded by acres of empty space. And good luck hearing anyone singing — troubadour or not — over all that noisy traffic.
The funny thing about our obsession with building endless strip malls is that their existence is a policy choice, not something that anyone is asking for. And by choice, I don’t mean our planning boards, city councils, and mayors have all decided that endless expanses of soulless asphalt are what our state needs, but rather that we have set zoning rules and town ordinances that ensure strip malls are the only kind of development we can legally build in many places.
The reason is simple: cars. In 167 of our 169 municipalities in Connecticut, local zoning rules include very elaborate provisions regarding parking. Any office, shop, bowling alley, apartment building, restaurant, supermarket, diner, or any kind of building our planners can imagine must have a set number of parking spaces, no matter where they are.
These rules differ from town to town, but they tend to be consistently excessive. A medium-sized bookstore, for instance, might need 20 spaces, while a coffee shop might need 30 more. A small performance space or community theater with 200 seats would require 50. A large supermarket might require 100. A bowling alley, meanwhile, might require up to five spots for each lane.
Car storage, however, requires a lot of space. The average parking spot uses about 350 square feet, including egress and circulation. More often than not, businesses must dedicate a majority of their footprint not to books, tables, or bowling lanes, but to a charmless, asphalt-covered desert built for heavy machinery instead of people. As a result, instead of our traditional main streets with happy families walking from shop to shop, we end up with a series of small buildings surrounded by ugly, unwelcoming, boring concrete. No one walks from one shop to the next because they are all far from each other, and the space around them is dedicated to cars instead of humans.
And we do dedicate a lot of space to cars. According to some estimates, the U.S. has more than two billion parking spaces, or more than seven for each registered motor vehicle in the country. The CT Parking Reform Project has mapped 191 downtown and city center districts across our state; a full 29% of land (4,327 acres, or almost seven square miles) is solely used for car storage, for an aggregate 630,000 parking spaces. Making things worse, some of the towns with the most stringent mandates (and largest shares of parking lots) also have rail or bus rapid transit, meaning that we are wasting untold amounts of space (that lays empty most of the time, as we have more parking spots than cars!) to warehouse inefficient, expensive, clumsy two-ton machines right where they are least needed. And we are doing this not because of any real market or public demand but simply because we are forcing developers to build this way.
There is a very simple way to make our towns and cities nicer: Eliminate parking mandates. There is a bill right now under consideration in the state legislature, H.B. 7061, that would do exactly that, letting business owners decide what they need without arbitrary, made-up, top-down impositions. Let them share spots if they choose to, rely on nearby garages or lots, or trust that their customers will walk, bike, or take public transportation to the premises. Instead of forcing businesses to subsidize drivers by dedicating most of their property to cars, we should let them decide what to do with their land. Instead of the current rules imposing strip malls everywhere, we should allow denser, non-car-centric development. Essentially, we should make traditional main streets and downtown areas — built-up, walkable, where cars do not take up all the space — legal again.
Besides making our towns nicer, abolishing parking mandates also has the added benefit of lowering housing costs significantly. Most Connecticut towns require a set amount of parking spaces per unit in new developments. Off-street parking, however, is really expensive to build, especially for multifamily projects; each spot in a garage costs, on average, $50,000. In dense, walkable neighborhoods or near transit, these parking spaces are often redundant, only contributing to making any dwelling unaffordable. As for businesses, it makes a lot more sense to allow homebuyers and developers to decide for themselves if they need a place to store their cars rather than having some bureaucratic planning committee decide for them.
If you’re wondering where everyone will park once we no longer have a mandate in place, it turns out that the market is more than capable of providing that service. Businesses want customers, after all, and they are really good at figuring out how to accommodate them. Towns can still build and maintain parking lots as needed. We know from experience that walkable main streets are really popular and provide an environment that helps small businesses thrive. With dense housing nearby (and no parking requirements), they can become vibrant, successful neighborhoods.
For those who prefer the convenience of strip malls, do not fret: abolishing parking minimums does nothing to them. Some businesses would still prefer to have loads of parking around them (say, a Home Depot), and that is fine; they can still have them, and they will still be there. For folks who like old-school Connecticut towns, cozy bookstores, and walking from one shop to another aimlessly, eliminating parking mandates will make them legal again.
(Sidenote: Public hearing for H.B. 7061 is this Friday, in case you want to tell lawmakers to support the legislation.)