A Parking Success and City Crisis

Posted by Rebecca Eggleston on December 15, 2009

Over the past 50 years, Hartford’s leaders have successfully achieved what they thought would bring greater prosperity to downtown: more parking.

The University of Connecticut’s Center for Transportation and Urban Planning, however, has revealed a frightening picture in its study of the cumulative effect on the city of providing parking.

“What we found was startling: Since 1960, the number of parking spaces in downtown Hartford increased by more than 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 as one historic building after another was demolished.”

Over that period “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.”

Read the full article here.