Au Revoir, Au Buchon 
By Martin Harris

News that a venerable New England hardware store chain will close its downtown Rutland location brings to mind once again the just-about-insoluble commercial core problem of mid-size cities: most Americans won’t spend where they can’t (easily) park. In large cities the apartment-dwelling natives are used to shopping without POV’s (privately-owned vehicles) and in small towns beyond New England there’s usually enough parking around the courthouse square near enough to the facing rows of stores to work reasonably well, but in mid-sized places like Rutland it’s impossible to comply with the mandatory math of contemporary urban planning: a square foot of parking for a square foot of retail, without challenging some aspect of the typical 19th century grid-square streets-and-buildings layout.

The Rutland Aubuchon set-up has maybe 3000 square feet of retail floor space, and by the normal rule of commercial site planning would need the equivalent of maybe ten customer parking spaces (2000 SF) loading dock and staff parking, (500 SF) and their share of related vehicle lanes (maybe another 500 SF or so). Its 40-foot frontage on West Street offers two parking spaces. Just north along Route 7, Brandon solved part of its math problem by permitting the demolition of a bunch of nice historic buildings to pave a couple of parking and service lots only as big as the in-town supermarket and drug store they serve, and further north Middlebury has paved part of the Otter Creek flood plain to service the Main Street stores a good uphill block-length distant. Still further north, St. Albans has decided not to decide, has done nothing,. and not surprisingly still has a "parking problem". On a larger scale, Los Angeles demolished almost half its downtown commercial square footage (it’s now the lowest-density major city in the US except for Youngstown and Detroit, for different sets of reasons) and has nearly-reasonable parking availability.  Johnson City, TN, has enough downtown vacancies that the street-side parking works fairly well for the remaining goods and services vendors: a Darwinian solution, you might say.

Rutland, conversely, went the other way with no demolition but adding a multi-deck downtown parking structure. I haven’t the column-inches here to review its historically unsuccessful user reception, but it was placed well over a block-length from Aubuchon’s and all the other store-fronts sharing the few parking spaces along West Street. Although some customers will walk more than an equivalent block-length from the edge of a huge parking lot to the mall stores it serves, in the typical shopping layout, they balk at the same level of exercise when needed to patronize stores in a downtown location.

And Montpelier went still another way, with urban-perimeter free parking spaces for POV’s and frequent-schedule free shuttle bus service to and from downtown.

That’s a total of four parking-solution options: the Brandon/LA downtown demo solution, the St.Albans do-nothing solution, the Rutland downtown parking structure solution, and the Montpelier perimeter-parking-and-shuttle solution. Of the four, I’d opine, the Montpelier solution is the most logical, city-friendly, and user-attractive.

Downtown demo equates to "destroy-the-village-to-save-it", a notion tried forty years ago; do-nothing keeps the buildings but loses the living; a downtown parking structure exacerbates the urban-center traffic it’s supposed to correct; but getting people out of POV’s away from downtown offers at least a chance of a pedestrian-friendly urban center where business can be transacted, particularly when the tote-bags aren’t too heavy.

As for Aubuchon and similar once-downtown enterprises which have long since fled to more efficient surroundings with less density and more parking, I’d guess that their management people aren’t swayed by the currently trendy keep-it-downtown (KID) ideology. We admire the photographs of an earlier time –that of our grand-parents—and choose to forget that they or our parents fled such surroundings as soon as they could, and we wax nostalgic over walk-up apartments, street-cars, brick-paved streets, and ornately Victorian little store-fronts,  which we personally want no part of. We consciously choose not to put our money where our admiration is, because contemporary Americans don’t want to live (or, less importantly, buy consumer hardware) in such difficult surroundings.

In Burlington, the KID ideology trumped operational logic and led to the expansion of a logistically-impossible regional-hospital complex on an already congested site, forcing an even-more-impossible site plan and a $300 million price tag. It compares poorly indeed to the operational efficiency of a modern Dartmouth-Hitchcock in exurban surroundings, the two-generation-earlier Middlebury example of a much smaller Porter complex similarly situated, and the mid-20th-century Rutland Hospital decision to abandon downtown for a nice large site in the near countryside.

As for Aubuchon’s au revoir, it seems pretty clear to me that their 51-year tenure in downtown Rutland would best be followed by planning for an equal tenure on a site where customers can easily carry their purchases to their POV’s parked right out front.

Martin Harris is a former Chairman of Citizens for Property Rights