Don't Like Traffic in Town?
Legalize Bakeries On Your Block
The Actual Cause of Traffic In Towns Like Ours
For all of its walkability, one thing my neighborhood lacks is a corner store. As a kid who grew up in a city, I was often sent down to the corner store to grab milk or laundry detergent. With any luck, I was able to get a Snickers with the change. The corner store wasn’t the place we did big grocery runs, but it got us through the week without having to drive to Star Market or wherever. It was nice to have!
Fairhaven’s current zoning laws make it illegal to open a small corner store (or other small business) in my neighborhood and most other parts of town.
That’s a bad thing for the quality of life here. It’s also a cause of traffic congestion. Here’s why:
With no corner store, anytime they need a few quick groceries, people in my neighborhood have to get in a car and drive to Stop N Shop once or twice more a week than we would if there were a bodega nearby1. There are about 150 households in my immediate neighborhood. So perhaps 150-300 car trips per week originate in my neighborhood and end up on collector streets and (in most cases) out on Route 6. But it’s not just the corner store that’s outlawed in my neighborhood. It’s pretty much any walkable small business you’d want. So if we want to go out to dinner, get takeout, grab a good cup of coffee, or buy a last-minute housewarming gift, chances are we’re going to have to get in a car. That’s thousands of additional cars that leave Fairhaven’s residential neighborhoods and end up on the same collectors and arterials every week. The accumulation of these small trips is a primary cause of traffic congestion (the other being spatial mismatch).
Enter MassDOT
MassDOT engineers are responsible for designing and maintaining the roads (and stroads) where everyone ends up on these short trips. When congestion triggers complaints from drivers, MassDOT engineers dutifully widen the roads, add more expensive and fancy traffic lights (which further congestion but allow for people to drive faster between having to stop), and add lanes (including slip lanes and turning lanes). As many others have documented, these changes never serve to address peak-hour congestion. They do result in increased driving speeds through town during non-peak hours. Increased speeds on our stroads then result in (on average) one person dying and six people being seriously injured here annually . And even if you’re convinced that the loss of life is just an unavoidable part of doing business, you have to admit that driving on a stroad like Route 6 sucks. State traffic engineers are very good at building and maintaining highways. And when drivers complain about traffic on roads running through our town, they will gladly apply highway design principles to those roads. What they won’t do, and what we shouldn’t expect them to do, is to be honest about the actual cause of traffic on those roads: restrictive zoning in all the neighborhoods that surround them.
What Does Your Neighborhood Need?
To my neighbors (or other readers who live in similarly SFH-restricted areas): if there were a business you could have within walking distance of home, what would it be? Imagine having a Portuguese bakery within walking distance. Being able to send the kids to grab treats after school. The smell of malasadas wafting down the street on the weekend. Not bad, right? Or maybe you’d be more excited about a flower shop, a hair salon, or a coffee shop? Nice to have nearby, no? And even if you never frequent these businesses, think of them as sponges that soak up hundreds of small trips your neighbors would otherwise make by driving down your street and onto Route 6 (or whatever your DOT stroad is called).
The Only Thing We Have to Fear
I imagine that for my neighbors, the biggest obstacle to getting behind this would be the dreaded fear of parking scarcity. The ability to park directly in front of one’s own home (even as many homes also have off-street parking) is seen as a sacred right in neighborhoods like ours. The fear of new businesses is usually the fear that they will bring more cars, which will in turn gobble up parking, leaving residents with no place to park near their homes. But remember the whole purpose of that little bakery is that it’s a place that your neighbors can walk to. Who wants to drive to Dunky’s when you can send the kids out to grab fresh sweet bread? If the malassadas are super popular and people are coming from afar and parking at the bakery, the town could always designate a daytime 15-minute customer parking spot in front of it. The thing to avoid is requiring off-street parking for the bakery. Why? That allows the business to be small (the only way for it to be viable for now) and it discourages people from driving to it.
We Can Start This Walk (or Ride) Together
I’m optimistic that over time we can overcome the fear of parking scarcity. But if (for now) that fear is too great to overcome, we can still push for encouraging more walkable businesses in our downtown areas, which are already zoned for mixed-use and have fewer minimum parking requirements. Olivia’s Restaurant is opening on Ferry Street soon— turning this street into a walkable destination is a real possibility. Rumor has it that Phairhaven Pharmacy2 is adding a soda fountain?! The Sip N’ Sit and the Nook are already favorite walking destinations for people near the center. And I’m sure there’s someone who still walks or bikes somewhere in East Fairhaven and on the Neck. Those of us who want more walkability need to focus on building a strong culture of walking and biking that leverages our current walkable businesses. Then we’ll have more of a base of people who will demand the freedom to buy sweet bread in our neighborhoods.
True, there’s a Cumby’s convenience store in the center, which is fine for a few of those trips.
Sorry, Brian! If you’re reading this and you live in Fairhaven, switch your prescriptions to Fairhaven Pharmacy— they’re the best!
"But remember the whole purpose of that little bakery is that it’s a place that your neighbors can walk to."
Sigh... This concept has been beaten out of the minds of people for at least two generations now and has become so counter intuitive to most people. I have this same argument with people here where the prevailing opinion is that we want "mom and pop" style local small business. But then the next statement is "we need them to have off street parking". We have a local micro brewery (maybe even call it a "nano brewery" it's so small) that repurposed its small gravel parking lot for people space - it's awesome because it has the perfect "enclosure" dimensions - because they want to cater to people who can walk/bike there as a neighborhood hangout spot. In fact most days there are very young kids playing in the lot while their parents chat. I know the owner and he's said he doesn't want people to drive there, that's not his business model. But our legislators and most residents just don't see the cognitive dissonance between local establishments and required parking. Sometimes it just feels like talking to a brick wall, but we'll keep on doing it.