When it comes to finding an answer for the downtown parking meter question, the biggest mistake Salem can make is trying to answer the parking meter question.
That’s because Salem doesn’t have a problem for which
parking meters are a solution. Indeed,
because we have for so long refused to grapple with our real problem, parking
meters are very likely only to aggravate and accelerate downtown’s decline.
The best metaphor for Salem’s downtown and our approach to
it is a Rubik’s Cube, that maddening three-dimensional puzzle where the
challenge is to twist and rotate the small multi-colored cubes into one larger
cube with six, one-color faces. You
can’t solve a Rubik’s Cube by attacking one color at a time. The puzzle forces
you to keep all six sides in mind as you make a move, and you must often be
willing to misalign several faces temporarily to move the whole puzzle towards
a solution. Impatient attempts to attack each side as an isolated problem always
produce greater frustration later, if not complete defeat.
If we want to solve Salem’s downtown conundrum and re-create
an attractive, thriving city that again offers the benefits that urban places
provide for residents and those in surrounding areas, we have to stop trying to
address Salem’s problems in isolation.
We need to realize our problems are as connected as the faces of a
Rubik’s Cube, and that we will not make progress unless we are willing to think
about the puzzle as a whole.
And thinking about the puzzle as a whole starts with
recognizing the main issue: Why did
Salem change from a thriving and attractive small urban center to one that
seems to present nothing but insoluble problems, problems that regularly defeat
the best efforts of well-intended people and investments of millions of
dollars?
I submit that the main cause of Salem’s decline is that, to
a very great extent, we stopped planning and building in Salem as a place for
people, and started concentrating all our efforts on serving only a particular
kind of people: people in cars.
The differences between a place built for people and a place
built for cars are both profound and pervasive, showing up in ways big and
small, far and wide. In Salem’s downtown, our focus on cars first has almost
entirely displaced and depleted the graceful social capital that was built up
and built into Salem before the post-WWII era of auto-mobility. And our failure
to come to grips with the way that people—even people who arrive in
cars—dislike and avoid places built to privilege cars is an important reason that
so much of what we try to do for or to downtown Salem is fruitless
wheel-spinning.
Like a Rubik’s Cube, our challenge has six faces and a hub,
around which the faces revolve. The hub
of Salem’s downtown puzzle is putting people first, not just people in cars. That
is the central hub because that’s what connects all of the six faces, none of
which can safely be ignored.
Around that hub, imagine a cube with four sides, a top, and
a bottom.
- One side is market-sector
economic goods and services, which are normally allocated by ability to pay;
- a
second face is public-sector goods, like buses, streets, bridges, roads,
schools, libraries, and parks, which are very often allocated by other means;
- a
third face is public health and safety, which is usually seen as a cost only,
and is often an unrecognized victim of choices in other areas;
- and the fourth face is our natural capital: the renewable and nonrenewable natural resources, including places for pollution to “go,” and which provides the real basis for our wealth and well-being.
The bottom of the box, which is supposed to support the
sides firmly and evenly, is our method for deciding the relationship between
the sides of the box: what we will provide for Salem via the market sector,
what the public sector should do, how much weight we will give to public health
and safety concerns, and how much of our finite stock of natural capital we
will spend, and how much we should leave for the people who will follow
us.
And the top of the box, which might
be thought of as the lid, or the opening that lets us access what’s inside, is
our time horizon: are we patient, willing to study a problem long enough to
consider how it looks from each of the four sides, or are we impatient, petulantly
demanding on aligning the green squares on one side, no matter what that does
to the rest?
Until Salem recognizes the central hub of our downtown
dilemma—overindulgence of the automobile at the expense of the habitability and
livability of downtown—and the way in which premature, single-focus solutions
to one problem just creates bigger problems to deal with elsewhere, we are
doomed to spin and twist at our little cube, while downtown suffers and the
last remnants of the once-thriving city dwindle away.
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