More on parking entitlement: Capitol Hill DC edition

Here's a blog entry from Capitol Hill Corner, "Zoning Regulations Revision Proposes Major Parking Changes for Capitol Hill – City Proposes Shifting Parking Costs From Developers to Residents," reporting on the consideration of the provisions of the Zoning Rewrite in terms of changes to parking requirements.

Interestingly, it terms the proposal as an imposition on residents and a boon to developers (not unlike how residents in Chevy Chase, Maryland in letters to the Gazette kept likening the Purple Line light rail system project not as something that would benefit the tens of thousands of transit users in the corridor to be served by the line, but as a giveaway to developers) who wouldn't have to build as much parking.

Despite the fact that Capitol Hill enjoys some of the best transit service in the U.S.--not just 7 subway stations, but commuter and inter-city railroad passenger service via Union Station, inter-city bus services via Union Station, and local bus services (Metrobus and the DC Circulator), the entry derides a focus on sustainable transportation as "a trend." From the entry:

The proposed revisions would have the effect of increasing density near Metro and bus stops and reducing parking in an attempt to further the currently in-vogue city planning concept of creating a livable, walkable city under the rubric of “new urbanism.”

Jesus H. Christ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

DC is quintessential "OLD URBANISM."

New urbanists learned from cities like DC (if you don't believe me, ask Andres Duany, a father of the movement--I once said nice things to him about Kentlands in Gaithersburg, which he designed, and he replied that I was better off appreciating what we already have in the city, that it's a lot better and always will be). And the reality is that New Urbanism is mostly a suburban land use planning movement. (Some of the people who deride it call it "New Suburbanism.")

I write so much about DC and Walking City (1800-1890) and Streetcar City (1890-1920) eras and the urban design precepts and spatial patterns that resulted that I even bore myself.  The city was designed to optimize walking first, and then biking and transit as those transportation modes were developed.

See Adams, J.S. “Residential structure of Midwestern cities.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 60: 1, pp. 37-62 (1970). Melosi, M.V. “ The Automobile Shapes the City: From ‘Walking Cities’ to ‘Automobile Cities.’ and Muller, P.O. “Transportation and urban form: Stages in the spatial evolution of the American metropolis,” in Susan Hanson and Genevieve Giuliano, eds., The Geography of Urban Transportation (New York: Guilford Press, 3rd rev. ed., 2004), pp. 59-85.

I guess it's absolutely true that it is bad when people have no grounding in history, especially the history of their own communities.