Jayne: When it comes to parking, Portland good role model

This is a good problem to have; it means businesses are thriving. But it also is an aggravating one — particularly for those who live near the bustling Uptown Village, where side streets are looking more and more like used car lots.

While the issue might seem to be relatively mundane minutiae that is part of creating a thriving city, it also is essential for the future of any metropolitan area. And that brings us to Portland and Ada Louise Huxtable.

Dreamworld urbanism

We have mentioned Huxtable before in columns, because what she wrote about Portland in 1970 (https://tinyurl.com/y7hq4xpz) is particularly prescient and insightful. A renowned architecture critic for The New York Times, Huxtable visited the city during its adolescence, when it was experiencing growing pains and striving to figure out what it wanted to be (her full article: https://tinyurl.com/y8hytrlq).

“This a dreamworld urbanism; a city blessed by nature and by man,” Huxtable wrote. “It is so lovely that Portlanders are lulled into a kind of fake security about its urban health.” She noted the “scattered bomb-site look of downtown parking lots” at a time when Portland was dotted by full-block one-level parking; she wrote about “inadequate public transportation”; she noted that “sixty percent of city ground is now covered by automobiles.”

Notably, Huxtable observed that “someday, some American city will discover the Malthusian truth that the greater the number of automobiles, the less the city can accommodate them without destroying itself. The downtown that turns itself into a parking lot is speeding its own dissolution.”

From the perspective of nearly five decades later, that sent us scrambling to learn what a Malthusian truth is. But back then it provided impetus for Portland to reinvent itself. In the mid-1970s, the city launched efforts to eliminate single-level parking, invest in mass transit, form bus-only and bike-friendly lanes, preserve old buildings, and create vibrant street-level activity.

That has led to decades of caterwauling from critics that Portland is anti-automoblie and that leaders ignore the fact that people want to drive. It also has led to one of America’s most thriving cities. That is not a coincidence. Portland stopped speeding its own dissolution and developed a dynamic downtown that is more inviting and more user-friendly.

All of which is only partially relevant to Vancouver. As the hub of the area, Portland always will possess different needs and different amenities than can be found on this side of the Columbia River.

And yet there is much to be said for keeping as many cars as possible off city streets and for developing mass transit and for limiting parking to multilevel garages. Getting from here to there requires incremental steps, but if we could tear it all down and start from scratch, that is what cities would do. Things would be different.