There Will Never Be “Enough” Parking

Here me out: there will never be enough parking.

What isn’t unique to Rochester, is that there is actually far more parking than there are people. In America, the estimate is roughly 800 million parking spaces (for a population slightly over 300 million in our country, and far fewer drivers than that). We don’t have a supply problem. This is a demand problem...

The sad part is that for the vast majority, there is no alternative. Decades of infrastructure built around supporting car travel has left little in the way of transit oriented development patterns. That is the sad part. We have a virtually non-existent transit system and this disproportionately affects the elderly and the poor. We have created more and more housing, further and further from the employment centers thus requiring our workforce to own (and maintain) a car.

More collective effort needs to be spent in establishing a robust transportation system, while at the same time we decrease the prioritization of the single occupancy parking trip to downtown. Accept reality on reality’s terms. We can never give up the automobile, but it may take a different position in our list of transit options. As the Med City Beat editor Sean Baker so succinctly explained, “Does this mean drivers will stop parking downtown altogether? No, of course not. But it means Rochester is going to have to develop new and more efficient ways of transporting patients, residents and workers.”