Joe's Thoughts

Rational people quickly become emotional about parking, and staunch conservatives turn into ardent communists.

– Donald Shoup

I recently attended my wife’s sister’s graduation at the Harang Auditorium in Thibodaux, Louisiana. It had been raining almost nonstop all day. Some roads were beginning to flood near the auditorium as the graduates dodged puddles and cars on their way inside. Since the parking lots bordering the auditorium were already filled, many attendees were stuck driving around searching for an open spot and some resorted to parking across a busy boulevard, with no crosswalks for a safe crossing. Thankfully, a lone police officer stood in the boulevard, stopping traffic so people could safely cross. We ended up parking behind a abandoned building’s old parking lot, walking through yet another parking lot for Aldi to get to the auditorium. We’d planned to walk from home and avoid the hassle of parking all together. An easy less than a half mile walk, which we’ve done before, but given the rain, the fact it’s not an enjoyable walk given the lack of sidewalks and crosswalks, we decided to drive. Searching for parking ourselves and watching many others do the same thing, someone could easily come to the conclusion that the area needs more parking, something local officials are considering for the auditorium; but, when you look from a distance you realize the entire area is predominantly devoted to parking already.

The Harang Auditorium has a capacity of 3,500. Assuming most attendees drive to the auditorium and carpool, bringing on average 3 people per car, it would require around 1,166 parking spaces. I used Google Earth to try and get a good estimate of the current number of spaces around the auditorium, including the large lots across the boulevard technically only for businesses in the strip. Counting all these spots yielded 700 – a 40% deficit. Providing “enough” parking for the auditorium would either require devoting even more land use to parking lots or building a very costly parking garage. The average cost of a parking garage per spot is between $25,000-$55,000. Yet adding more parking would likely only increase demand for parking, further reduce walkability, and still fail to address the underlying issue: how can people travel to and from the auditorium easily and safely? The only safe option today is by car, given the cities lack of good urban planning and funding of an existing, almost unusable, bus system (good luck finding the bus times), and the lack of safe pedestrian and bike routes in the area. A landscape which once was dominated by sugarcane fields – harvested, grinded and milled by locals to produce raw sugar and molasses that supported the regional economy – has been transformed into a sprawling expanse of concrete, interrupted only by scattered businesses. The environment is hostile to pedestrians and designed almost exclusively around the needs of cars. One might think this is a natural evolution. A sort of metamorphosis, caused by natural economic forces and consumer demand. In reality most of the driving force for the current parking environment, and as a consequence the urban landscape in places like Thibodaux and throughout America, is government-mandated minimum parking requirements, policies that require businesses and developments to provide large amounts of parking regardless of actual demand.

Thibodaux has minimum parking requirements. Suppose Sally, a local resident, wants to open a pet grooming business. Under their current zoning codes, she would need to provide one off-street parking space for every 350 square feet of gross floor area. If that parking didn’t already exist, she’d need to provide the required parking spaces to obtain approval or permits. This could mean constructing new parking, leasing/shared parking, or finding a property that already complies. Now imagine Sally could open her business in a walkable neighborhood where many of her customers could simply arrive on foot while walking their dogs. In theory, that kind of location would naturally generate business while reducing the need for parking. In practice, though, current zoning laws make that kind of mixed-use, walkable development extremely difficult. the cost of constructing parking gets folded into the cost of doing business, which ultimately gets passed on to customers. If that sounds too hypothetical, consider a more concrete example (pun intended): the land Nicholls State University donated to the Center For Traditional Louisiana Boat Building & Museum, which my wife’s grandfather co-founded in 1979.

Being a non-profit doesn’t exempt you from the minimum parking requirements. In addition to raising funds for the building itself and the preservation of the boats and museum, the organization may also be forced to bear the cost of constructing additional parking. The site is close to the University but across the highway. In theory, visitors could make use of existing University parking and walk to the museum if the city implemented measures to make that stretch of highway safer and more accessible for pedestrians. This illustrates the burdens minimum parking requirements put on local businesses and organizations. The boat center plays an important role preserving Louisiana’s boatbuilding heritage, and I hope the city can find ways to ease this burden. This leads to my first point: minimum parking laws are bad for business. They not only increase costs for business but disproportionally affect local/small businesses relative to corporations, whom have ample capital to build as much parking as a local cities laws require. Removing such requirements promotes small businesses, while also allowing for better land usage. In part two of this series, I’ll go into other negative effects of minimum parking requirements on American towns and cities, why removing them improves the urban landscape, while still allowing drivers to easily park, albeit not for free.

When I first visited Disney World with my family as a child, I was captivated by the monorails. I had never seen anything like it. A highway in the sky that could take me pretty much anywhere in the parks. I didn’t need a car, I didn’t need a license, I didn’t need mom or dad to bring me, and I didn’t need to ride my bike on the shoulder of a highway. All I had to do was walk to a nearby station and get on the monorail. For a boy from south Louisiana, it was my first experience with a well thought out public transit system, and I loved it. It was freedom.

It made me think about my grandmother, who lived in New Orleans at the time, and how we once took the streetcar, something that you did because it was a novel thing to do and not for practical reasons. A crumbling piece of history. She’d tell me stories of her as a teenager taking the streetcars around the city with her friends. It made me angry, since from my perspective I was under house arrest as a kid without a car. The monorail and walkability of Disney’s parks are one small piece that makes Disney a magical place. Walt Disney had an even grander vision for EPCOT, a vision he never was able to fully realize after his death in 1966. A larger transit system was planned, built for people, not cars. Cars would be used for longer, extended trips, and roads in the city would be underground, leaving the surface for people.

It was going to be the city of tomorrow. Remembering my grandmother’s stories, while sitting on the monorail, in a futuristic city for today’s standards but built in the 1970s, made me wonder what the hell happened. What happened to the city of tomorrow, I asked myself. Why can’t I go anywhere safely without a car?

American cities were originally built for pedestrians, given the fact personal cars weren’t owned by everyone. This meant density was a critical part of designing and building cities. It naturally led to neighborhoods with corner stores, restaurants, bars, and other mixed uses, owned by families who lived upstairs. People went to these places because they were easily accessible. They’d cross paths on the street with their neighbor on the way to work and chat. City streets were designed to make it easy for pedestrians to get from point A to B easily and spend their money along the way. When walking wasn’t practical, you could bike and many cities developed street car systems when walking or biking wasn’t practical.

A central assumption of a cities planning was that it was going to be inhabited by people. Even when the automobile came on the scene in the 1920s, many Americans considered the driver to be a tyrant that deprived others of their freedom and rights. Having a requirement for cities and towns to be walkable and dense naturally made them conducive to people having a sense of community. Interactions with all walks of life on the city streets were more common, a rarity today. I’d argue having less of these types of “weak” social interactions can partly be attributed to the the divisions and mental health declines in our country today. A 2014 study showed the importance of weak social ties on our overall happiness. Having walkable cities also meant exercise was built into our daily lives. A gym membership wasn’t a requirement to safely walk. You didn’t need a treadmill or track to exercise, going nowhere. It was just part of daily life. The lower rates Americans walk relative to other countries, attributes to higher rates of obesity and other health risks.

I think most people underestimate how deeply our increasingly man made environment shapes our happiness and wellbeing. How we move within that environment is important. Walt Disney understood this and we were on the path towards his dream city of tomorrow, but as time went on in America we started going down another path. One where the car was going to be at the center. I’d argue having this car centric view of our environment, towns and cities, is a detriment to our society. When we started to demolish our walkable cities and neighborhoods to build our suburbs, highways and interstates that cut through downtowns, we lost some pieces of daily life that made life more enjoyable. We started creating minimum parking laws, requiring each business to take up more land and be less compact. We zoned areas so only single family homes, with lawns, could be built. And by the 1950s, we removed most streetcars in favor of personal cars. Today, in most American cities the only way to get anywhere is with a car, irrespective of distance. Our once walkable cities are now urban sprawls. Source material for memes. Our towns and cities lost a piece of their humanity.

Most pedestrian routes are now dangerous, requiring people to walk on or near roads with fast moving cars. Everything in a modern American city revolves around the car, and cars are ingrained into our culture as much as guns are. It’s a status symbol of one’s wealth and something we’re constantly told we need. Not just a car, but a car that fits your needs and lifestyle. It’s not that cars are evil. They’re amazing pieces of engineering that let us travel great distances easily, but I’d argue in most scenarios a 4x4 truck or an SUV the size of a tank is not the optimal form of transport for most trips we Americans take.

By making them a minimum requirement to participate in modern American society, we also greatly increase the barriers of entry for everyone. It creates a chicken and egg problem: one must have a car to do the things required to survive, like get a job, but to get a job one must have a car. I was lucky like many Americans and my parents got me my first car, but everyone isn’t as fortunate. Owning a car isn’t cheap, either. The current average price of a new car is around $49,000 to $50,000, they have steep depreciation curves, and more than 80% finance these machines today. This is all to say owning a car is a liability. Not an asset. But it’s a requirement we’ve made for everyone. AAA calculated the annual cost of owning a car at $10,728. Thibodaux’s population is 15,405 (where I’m currently located), which puts the collective cost of mobility for Thibodaux roughly at $165,264,840 million. One might think: America needs to be car centric because it’s so big and we travel great distances. Though this has some truth, and some trips do require a car, the data doesn’t support this. The majority of car trips are less than 6 miles.

One could also make the claim that most cities do in fact have some form of public transit (usually a bus system), but the majority are so underfunded they’re unusable, and since they’re unusable no one uses them unless they absolutely have to. So, no one wants to fund them. Another chicken and egg problem. I’d argue that having taxes or other Government revenue streams to fund a good public bus system is more cost effective and ends up being cheaper for citizens versus everyone owning their own car, a liability. American cities end up spending billions on projects to widen or add more roads, which has been proven to not improve traffic. Investment in public transit like buses provide better returns of tax dollars. Sure, most of us would still own cars, but it shouldn’t be a requirement for everyone. It should be a luxury item, not a necessity. We Americans like to always think we’re the best at everything, but when it comes to urban development and public transit, we’re far behind the curve. All you have to do to realize this fact is take a trip to a place like the Netherlands to see for yourself.

Most American’s love visiting european cities because it’s the first time they’ve been somewhere where they don’t need a car to get around. They go on walking tours of Rome, take the Tube in London to see Big Ben (remember to mind the gap), and go biking around all of Amsterdam. To an American, this is all a novel experience that is just normal for europeans. These are places with similar populations as American cities. The cities are just have denser than the modern American city, with transit systems and mixed land use. Just look at a comparison between Atlanta and Barcelona.

Many Americans equate owning a personal car to being free and independent. I disagree. True freedom is having multiple viable ways to move through society. Even though this is our current reality, it doesn’t mean it has to be this way forever. It’s a solvable problem. There’s no law of nature that says modern society requires cars for transport. All we need to do is change the way we think about our towns and cities, demand our local politicians prioritize urban planning, and realize that making everyone own a car to function in society is a misguided view of the world, which negatively impacts our daily lives and quality of life. The city of tomorrow should be a city that, as Walt Disney put it, “caters to the people as a service function.”

A lot happened this past weekend, most of which we didn’t plan for. On Saturday morning, I went on a run with a buddy I met through my wife’s work and his friend. On our run along the Tennessee River, we talked about video games we’ve been playing lately and, when they asked me, I told them all about Kingdom Come Deliverance, a historically accurate game set in 15th century Bohemia where you play as a blacksmith’s son whose village is attacked by Cuman mercenaries who kill your parents and steal the last sword your father ever made. The rest of the game you are trying to find the lost sword and avenge your parents death but, it’s so much more. You also have to manage your character’s hunger and sleep, maintain your equipment and repair your armor, bathe at at bathhouses, sharpen your swords with a sharpening stone (doing it wrong dulls your sword) and lots of other things that make the game very real to life. Some people think it’s boring and cumbersome; I think it’s brilliant. Further on our run along the river we passed the BASF chemical plant and probably breathed in toxic chemicals. Jokingly, I said: “guys, we should hold our breath so we don’t get cancer.” I’m pretty sure my new friend didn’t breathe, an extraordinary feat while running if true, and we laughed about it. I, on the other hand, accepted that breathing these toxins would probably cut my life by a minute. That’s the price we pay for plastic I guess. Passing the chemical plant also reminded us of the chicken plant right in the heart of downtown Chattanooga and how there are these fancy condos literally right next to it. It’s basically on top of the chicken factory and it must smell horrid. Like, some people’s balconies just overlook a chicken factory. Imagine how insane it is to buy that for like 500k. It got me thinking about how there’s probably people out there who are really into chicken factories and daydream about having one of those condos. They walk outside with their copy of Food Manufacturing, take a sip of their coffee and a big deep breath, taking in the smells of American industry coming from the factory with a smile on their face. They tell everyone they meet how Chick-Fil-A isn’t possible without such places. They don’t buy room plugs at Bath and Body Works because the smell from that factory is free. Look, there’s 8 billion people. Some of them are bound to be obsessed with chicken factories. There’s a market for these condos after all. It’s more likely these buyers can’t smell or never go outside but, I believe the weird chicken factory lovers are out there. They’re walking our streets right now. Anyways, 2 miles past the BASF factory we eventually turned around and headed back (yes, we passed by the factory twice and now my life is now 2 minutes shorter). We ended up doing about 6 miles. It was a lot of fun and we talked about doing it again soon. They’re trying to get me to do a half marathon with them. Hopefully we pick a different route next time that doesn’t pass a chemical plant twice. Walking back to my car, I got a text from another friend of mine who wanted to go play soccer. I ended up meeting him after lunch. Talk about a regrettable idea after running 6 miles. When I was finally home for good around 3pm, I just collapsed on the floor. Every time I do that our cat Ginger is always so concerned. I can’t tell if she’s concerned for my well being or just worried if she’ll be able to get her next meal on time. It was an exhausting morning but I gelt very accomplished.

On the floor in my living room, I got an emergency alert. It said we were under a severe thunderstorm warning for like 15 minutes with winds up to 80 miles per hour. I usually pay attention to these alerts and I’m always checking the radar, keeping my wife informed. I’m basically her personal weather man, but I was tired this afternoon. Also, why would I get off the floor and pick up things on the porch if it’ll be over in 15 minutes? I need my rest. Well, this time the extreme weather alert wasn’t an exaggeration. We did in fact get 80 mile per hour winds and it blew everything I failed to pick up on the porch in our yard. The shelf outside with all the heavy things we never use blew over. It was like a tropical storm passed through. The alert was surprisingly spot on. Perhaps the Government was testing their weather control machine. Towards the end, we lost power and when my wife got home from work, she told me she saw some downed trees. We decided to go on a walk to assess the extent of the damage in our neighborhood, something we always enjoy doing after a storm. On our walk, we realized the damage was worse than we thought. We saw more downed trees, some of which were very large. We didn’t see any that fell on a house but quite a few fell on power lines. Someone sent us the power outage map. That’s when we realized we might be out of power for a while.

Realizing we probably weren’t cooking tonight, unless we wanted to cook with our camping stove, we decided to see if our neighborhood pub, Tremont Tavern, still had power. It was a treacherous journey where we encountered another downed tree in the road but we eventually made it to Tremont and, to our amazement, they had power. Our refuge from the storm where we met another couple, on a date night, who were also from Louisiana, moving to Chattanooga a year ago. It’s always nice meeting fellow Louisianians in Chattanooga.

Disclaimer: This is Ashlynn at Tremont a few months back

After our dinner, we walked back home. It was dark by then and the sound of chainsaws cutting downed trees could be heard in the distance. We joked about all the exited men who bought a chainsaw against their wives wishes could now put it to use. The night sky and moon clearer than usual since there wasn’t much light pollution and the storm cooled the air some. It was a pleasant walk back to the house. Back at home, we decided we didn’t want to sleep with no A/C, so we called up our good friends Laura and Jon who had power, packed a few things and evacuated to their house. We thought for sure we’d have power back by Sunday. The linemen were already out working. We were wrong. After it was all said and down we didn’t get our power back till Monday morning. On Sunday, we put some of our food in an ice chest to try and save it but we still lost some food that I’m still grieving (I’m so sorry I didn’t save you chicken thighs). Thankfully, the whole ordeal wasn’t nearly that bad since we have good friends who let us stay with. I’m glad we have them. I also want to thank all the emergency workers that responded after the storm and hard working linemen who got our power back on. It was a unique weekend we’ll never forget.

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

– George Bernard Shaw

The more people of a democracy value knowledge, prudence, humility, and most importantly, kindness, the happier they’ll be. Society’s happiness, as John Adam’s put it in his “Thoughts on Government”, is the end of government. America being a democracy, our government, in part, is a reflection of the people; thus, If we desire higher quality representation and leaders, ones that embody these qualities and act with our collective best interest in mind, we must first start with ourselves. By instilling the qualities we desire in our government, we set the bar high, as it should be. America has many complex challenges facing it. We can’t all be experts and no one is perfect; nevertheless, we should hunger for knowledge and know where our own ignorance’s lye. We must search for truth, wherever it leads. We must be kind to one another, even though it seems impossible at times. We must be willing to challenge others beliefs, having candid, respectful, debates. And as always, we must be wary of those who possess great power for even the best of us can abuse it. An individual’s goal in a democratic society is to embody all of these traits as best they can. Just as the captain of a ship navigating a stormy sea can only hope to find calmer waters with the help of good, knowledgeable, officers and crew, we cannot hope to help steer our democracy to calmer waters and a sandy shore without the help of each and every one of us. A better tomorrow is out there for America, even as perilous as the waters may seem today.