Date: Fri 12-Feb-1999

Publication: Bee

Author: CURT

Quick Words:

powell-stadium-parking

Full Text:

COMMENTARY: Best Football Stadium Parking Might Be No Parking At All

By Chris Powell

What will be done about parking in downtown Hartford once the football stadium

is built and 30,000 or more cars head there on many Saturday and Sunday

afternoons in the fall and early winter?

Already there is talk of building a lot of parking garages downtown. But the

best solution to the downtown parking problem might be simply no additional

downtown parking at all.

More parking garages downtown would solve only part of the problem; they would

only worsen traffic congestion. Getting all the cars in and out of the garages

would take hours and require a lot of expensive road and highway work.

It's probably not necessary.

For starters, much of East Hartford just across the Connecticut River has

become a parking lot, Pratt & Whitney's industrial and airport property being

largely vacant. There is plenty of room there for those fabled football

tailgate parties, and shuttle buses could have fans across the river at the

stadium turnstiles within ten minutes.

Then there's the Amtrak railroad line still operating between Springfield, New

Haven and New York. It is dotted with local railroad stations in deteriorating

downtown areas, as in Windsor Locks and Meriden. Schedule a few special

excursion trains on game days, as the railroads of old did, and lay trolley

lines from Union Station in Hartford a few blocks east to the stadium, and

suddenly there would be plenty of parking everywhere on the north-south axis

and plenty of easy access to downtown.

Further, the state-owned bus service in the Hartford area and commercial bus

companies might do well with their own excursion routes to the stadium from

the suburbs.

All this would dramatically reduce drunken driving, always a threat among

football partiers.

Putting the parking outside the city -- in East Hartford and along the

railroad track -- might even make money as long as nobody called it "mass

transit," which is unprofitable in Connecticut because of insufficient

population density. (Even the Metro-North commuter railroad service between

New Haven and New York City, the most densely populated area of the state, is

heavily subsidized by the government.)

Much less new infrastructure would be required for a stadium transportation

system built around shuttle buses, trolleys and the railroad than for parking

garages and road work for 30,000 or so cars.

The key to success for an alternative to parking garages would be the

frequency of shuttle bus and trolley service before and after football games,

so that people would have confidence that there would be a second or third

trolley or bus if they missed the first one and that they could safely leave

their cars at home.

The most complicated aspect of something like this -- a few blocks of trolley

lines -- is a technology that Connecticut mastered and then abandoned about 70

years ago but that could lead downtown Hartford "back to the future." Indeed,

a simple, frequent, reliable, and prominently marked trolley and bus system

around downtown Hartford with links to suburban parking lots, operating around

the clock or close to it, might arise from efforts on Game Day and eventually

contribute more to downtown Hartford's revival than the stadium itself would.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of The Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)