Joe's Thoughts

After writing my first blog post about parking, I’ve done more research into the history of minimum parking requirements and the negative impacts they’ve had on our towns and cities over the past 100 years. In 1923, Columbus, Ohio was the first city in the United States to add minimum parking requirements to their zoning code, and by the 1950s almost every city started adding them. I suggest reading From Chaos to Order: A Brief Cultural History of the Parking Lot for a history of parking and the driving forces for these laws. I honestly can’t think of a single piece of zoning code and law that has done more damage to our towns and cities in America. Columbus, Ohio has now even walked back these laws, removing all minimum parking requirements in the Downtown District and along 140 miles of key transit and commercial corridors. Minimum parking requirements guarantee sprawl and cause a whole slew of negative impacts for our towns and cities. Go anywhere in America that isn’t a crumbling historic downtown (car dependency can be contributing to it crumbling, too) and you’ll find mostly empty parking lots everywhere.

Imagine if Disney was designed like American cities are today. Every ride, attraction and building would have its own parking requirements mandated by the park’s “zoning code.” It would probably look like this:

You might ask: how are the real minimum parking requirements generated? Well, the answer could be a whole separate blog post, but the gist is that they’re either guesses, taken from other city’s laws or from this handbook, whose statistics are questionable in many places. Here’s my hometowns minimum parking requirements.

Okay – back to our hypothetical Disney park with minimum parking requirements. The table above means the park’s rides and attractions would be pushed further away from each other, separated by their own parking lots as well as other lots for things between like gift shops and restaurants. The area wouldn’t be very walkable. Guests would drive from each ride, irrespective of distance, since most of the infrastructure is devoted to mandated parking lots. After riding Space Mountain, you and your family would navigate a large parking lot, probably with no tree coverage or clear pedestrian paths, to get back in your car and drive to Pirates of the Caribbean, where you’d search for a parking spot, park, and then walk through yet another large asphalt parking lot. Then you’d queue for the ride. Imagine how different the Disney experience would be repeating this all day. Disney would become exhausting, inconvenient, and far less magical. Luckily, Disney has no such parking requirements and is designed for people once you’re inside the park. Because you’re walking, you naturally stop for things like ice cream, browse shops, watch a parade, stumble across a character, or discover an attraction you weren’t planning to visit. Those unplanned moments are often what make the trip memorable. From a business perspective, it means there’s more opportunities for guests to spend more money getting places. However, this hypothetical Disney park with lots of large parking lots is exactly the experience almost every American city gives to residents today, and one of the major driving forces for this urban-sprawl and over supply of off-street parking are these minimum parking requirements. It’s a piece of law that is ripe for deregulation.

Minimum parking requirements are one piece that makes our towns and cities only navigable by car. Like the cars in the Cars universe are real and that’s who we built our cities for. Here’s a good example I found recently in Dallas showcasing this point. This area of the city has been engineered for car dependency.

I’m planning on attending my next local cities Planning and Zoning Board meeting to discuss minimum parking requirements. Below are my reasons for a town or city to remove their minimum parking requirements. As I mentioned previously, I’m in Thibodaux, LA, so some of the points below are specific to my hometown, but they can easily be applied to any other town or city.

• If you own land, you should have the right to use it to its highest and best economic use. Forcing businesses to devote their property to arbitrary sized parking lots is an infringement on reasonable private property rights. A land owner shouldn’t be limited to how much of that land can be used for actual economic uses under reasonable circumstances. 700 Saint Patrick Street is an example of an historic building that is limited on what it can become based on the lot size and the minimum parking requirements, even though historic neighborhoods are next to it. It’s currently vacant.

• Minimum parking requirements make it difficult for developers and architects to design compact, pedestrian-friendly places. By requiring every new development to dedicate significant land to parking, sometimes larger than the footprint of the actual building, these regulations discourage walkability and higher-density development while encouraging an auto-oriented pattern of growth. These laws likely play a role in North Canal Boulevard being built up for car-centric commerce and having less development closer to more historically dense, walkable areas, which are illegal to develop today. Corporate and fast-food chains also use standardized building and parking prototypes to quickly deal with these poor zoning codes and minimum parking requirements. This causes residents to use cars for every trip irrespective of distance because alternatives are unsafe and require navigating large parking lots with no clear way to navigate as a pedestrian or biker. It also means corporations dominate the area, since they’re the only ones that can afford the parking costs. Think of the current strip mall area across from the Civic center, which I’ve written about.

• The city already knows parking minimums don’t really work. No single formula can accurately predict the parking needs of every business, on every property, under every circumstance. A 2010 Thibodaux Zoning Review concluded that parking minimums are “sometimes too much and at other times too little.” It goes on to provide a case given by local officials where “a medical clinic that met the parking requirements as delineated in the city’s zoning ordinance; however, the tremendous number of patients visiting the clinic has far exceeded the allotted parking space.” If the required number is frequently wrong, it shouldn’t be mandatory and regulated by the city. The best people to decide how much parking is needed are individual businesses and developers.

• Parking isn’t free. Minimum parking requirements increase the cost of buildings, consumes valuable land, causes environmental challenges such as flash flooding and runoff, and raises rents and commercial leases. These costs are ultimately passed down to consumers, tenants, and homeowners. It also disproportionately impacts smaller businesses, since large corporations have ample capital to build as much parking as a city requires. In addition, it increases costs for taxpayers, since more roads, water lines, and drainage systems are needed to support the urban sprawl parking requirements can create.

• Minimum parking requirements lower the tax base per acre. Every square foot required by law to be devoted to surface level parking instead of productive development is a square foot that generates little tax revenue. For example, imagine we have two 1 acre lots of land in Thibodaux. One is a 1 story retail building with a large parking lot and another is a two story mixed-use building, where the ground floor is a coffee shop and barber shop, and the second floor apartments. The building has a shared parking lot that takes up a smaller footprint (pretend the apartments are near Nicholls and often occupied by students who don’t own cars). Both lots require roughly the same surrounding city infrastructure but the second lot is likely worth several times more than the first, increasing property tax revenue. Surface level parking is dead weight from a tax perspective, and since both roughly use the same city resources, the increase in tax revenue could be invested back into the surrounding area for things like improving sidewalks, building protected bike lanes and adding bike racks for those living in the apartments above.

• Existing on-street parking regulations already address parking concerns. Much of the opposition to approving businesses that do not meet off-street parking minimums stems from fears that vehicles will park in front of residential driveways or on residential streets. However, blocking driveways is already prohibited under existing city ordinances. The issue is one of enforcement, not development standards. If illegal parking occurs, it should be addressed through enforcement of current laws. Some ways I can think of the city could alleviate resident concerns is by making sure curb space is treated as a managed resource by:

  • Providing designated parking zones via curb paint, signage, and marking areas where parking isn’t permitted (e.g, near driveways).
  • Implement time-limited, permit parking or even parking meters in sensitive residential areas.
  • Allow “small-scale commercial by right” in residential areas, where certain uses are allowed without requiring special exceptions or parking studies, for businesses that neighborhoods can benefit from such as coffee shops, barbershops, and pet grooming. These types of local businesses would benefit from foot traffic from local residents.
  • Invest in alternative modes of transportation in these areas such as building sidewalks and protected bike lanes along with limiting on-street parking, which would drive more foot traffic and decrease parking demand if done well.

• Transportation investments and parking regulations work together to shape how people travel. Parking minimums subsidize one mode of transportation. The city is effectively subsidizing car ownership at a detriment to people who don’t or can’t afford a car, and these residents still pay for the subsidy. Local investments along with these laws almost guarantee car ownership is a minimum requirement to function in the community. Between Lafourche Parish and DOTD, approximately $11–12 million, on average, can be expected to be spent on road improvements each year relative to $90,000/year going toward giving people alternatives such as walking and biking. This creates a feedback loop where:

  1. Roads are widened and maintained to handle more cars and few safe alternatives are invested in and built.
  2. Everyone drives to places, irrespective of distance.
  3. Businesses feel pressure to add more parking.
  4. The city requires even more parking through minimum parking requirements, pushing parking supply even higher.
  5. More land is devoted to parking instead of homes or businesses, creating an urban sprawl.

Removing minimum parking requirements doesn’t mean eliminating off-street parking. Instead, it would simply allow the free market to decide how much parking is needed. Businesses are the best suited to decide how much parking makes economic sense for their property instead of requiring a predetermined amount by law. Research conducted by UCLA further strengthens the argument for removing minimum parking requirements. Shreveport has also proposed similar changes and numerous other real world examples exist today, where these arbitrary regulations were removed and ended up improving the city. Below is a map showing all the cities that have already removed minimum parking requirements from their city’s code.

I strongly believe removing minimum parking requirements is a form of deregulation that actually benefits residents, consumers, and small businesses. I’ll leave you with this amazing video done by Rollie Williams that covers this entire topic and is incredibly hilarious and entertaining even for a 30 min video on parking. I highly recommend spending the time to get through it if you care about your own local town and city.

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’s currently the Spring rainy season here in Louisiana, and on this day it had been raining almost nonstop. 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. Many resorted to parking across a busy boulevard, which lacked any crosswalks for safe crossing. Thankfully, a lone police officer in a poncho stood in the boulevard, directing traffic and granting people safe passage. We decided to park behind an old abandoned building’s crumbling parking lot and walked through yet another parking lot for the Aldi next 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 already predominantly devoted to just parking.

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 adjacent businesses. Counting all these spots yielded 700 – a 40% deficit. Providing “enough” parking for the auditorium would require devoting even more land use to surface 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, prevent beneficial urban density, and fail to address the underlying issue, which is: 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 or 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 came about in the 1920s during the early days of the automobile and require businesses and developers 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 result is the cost of constructing parking gets folded into the cost of doing business (either a direct cost to the construction of Sally’s business or a indirect one via a higher lease), 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 structure itself and the preservation of the boats and museum, the organization likely will be required by law 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 boat-building heritage, and I hope the city can find ways to ease this burden.

All of this is to say: 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 these mandates promotes small businesses, encourage more efficient land use, support higher-density development, and make it easier to create walkable communities and invest in alternatives such as bike lanes and public transit.

Infrastructure costs money. In Thibodaux, and in most American towns and cities, we’ve spent decades passing laws and funding projects that prioritize cars above everything else, often at the expense of walkability and public space. I’m a strong advocate for moving away from that entirely car-centric mindset, which I’ve discussed in a previous post. Eliminating minimum parking requirements doesn’t mean eliminating parking. Businesses would still provide parking when it makes economic sense to do so. The difference is that parking decisions would be driven by actual demand rather than blanket government mandates. This approach would give developers, business owners, and local governments more flexibility to create places that are easier to navigate whether you drive, walk, bike, or take the bus.

Parking will always be an important part of urban planning. But it shouldn’t be the default solution to every transportation problem.

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.