Downtown has too many cars and not enough people
Orlando officials recently announced that they’re going to pay for your parking if you visit downtown.
This raises an important question about how our city is planned: why aren’t there enough downtown residents to support the businesses on their own?
Urbanist icon Jane Jacobs once wrote, “You can’t rely on bringing people downtown. You have to put them there.”
The city should be laser focused on significantly increasing the density of residents downtown.
One challenge to increasing housing density is that we devote so much space to cars. A recent mapping analysis by the Parking Reform Network revealed that 29% of downtown Orlando’s central business district is dedicated to parking. No wonder we pay people to park here — we’ve got plenty of parking and not enough people.
This week, a beautiful mural that represents what Orlando has to offer was unveiled in downtown Orlando, at Pine Street and Orange Avenue. It’s truly fantastic. But it was painted next to an empty lot in the middle of the downtown of our city. The mural is meant to represent the vibrancy of our city; it very well may, but the empty lot it stands beside represents what could be but isn’t.
It’s not just empty lots, though. Last month, the Central Florida Expressway Authority announced that they will be widening the 408 through downtown, further tearing apart the urban fabric of our city center. That sad truth is that too many regional leaders think of downtown Orlando as little more than a parking lot for suburbanites. Our highways are built in service of them, to the detriment of the downtown neighborhoods themselves.
This, after the horrendous widening of I-4 that further segregated downtown’s westside from its eastside. One would have hoped we would have learned our lesson about how to move people around our region and how to build a thriving city center.
One silver lining to the I-4 Ultimate widening was that we were told we would see an “Under-I” project, full of parks and amenities like a skate park that ran along the streets below our wretched urban highway.
But that was not to be either. The city of Orlando recently backtracked on this promise and snatched away many of the proposed amenities, including the skate park. Why? Because they want to put parking spaces under the highway instead.
Sometimes I feel I need some visuals: “This is your brain. This is your brain on parking.”
Sorry, kids. No skate park for you. Really none of our streets are safe for you to play on. It’s best that you just stay inside at all times. Pay no mind to anyone from previous generations who chastise you for never playing outside (in the car-reliant hellscape that they helped create).
When we sacrifice our city for parking, we ensure that it’s easy to access but hard to enjoy.
Forget about making it easy to drive downtown. We need to be making it easy to live downtown.
Let’s double, triple, and quadruple down on building residential density downtown. Want to support downtown businesses? Get more residents to live downtown. Want to attract highwage jobs? Get more residents to live downtown. Want to build a functioning transit system? Get more residents to live downtown. And if you want to get more residents to live downtown, focus on dramatically increasing the housing supply and improving quality of life for the people who live there.
As a downtown goes, so goes a city and so goes a region.
In my lifetime, I hope to see a downtown Orlando that does not need to pay people to visit it. I want to see a downtown Orlando that people would pay anything to experience; that most or all of the tens of millions of visitors a year to Orange County would demand to spend a day of their vacation exploring a beautiful, walkable, vibrant downtown.
But to have it, we need to build it.