The Montgomery County courthouse, in the county seat of Rockville, is old and badly needs replacing. Maryland is ready to pay for a new courthouse on a downtown site formerly occupied by the library, but some people want to move it. There are good arguments for moving it and for not moving it. There are also some very bad arguments. In particular, many who advocate changing the location argue that the courthouse should be surrounded by lots of parking. This would be a bad idea.

Downtown Rockville would a great place to create a parking district like what’s worked great in Pasadena and Boulder. By managing parking demand, the area could accommodate more activity, from apartments to shopping to the courthouse, without requiring more and more garages, just as many other suburban downtowns have successfully done. Unfortunately, too many citizens are stuck in old modes of thinking about parking: that more is always better. It’s not.

Advocates for keeping the library site (like the county Chief Judge) make two arguments: first, that the planning has already gone too far on the current site to change directions (not really relevant to this blog), and second, that the proximity of the site to other courts and the DA’s and public defender’s offices makes the site more convenient. The alternate site suggested is only four blocks away, so one might argue it’s walkable in any case, but it’s important to avoid generating extra car trips. If judges, lawyers, defendants, witnesses and others end up driving from one courthouse to another, that will have a far worse impact on traffic and parking than any other.

Planners have started talking about “park once” districts. When a city is made of separate strip malls, schools, apartments, and offices each with their own parking lots, everyone has to get in the car, drive, and re-park to go to every single activity, adding traffic and parking demand. Instead, if people can park once and walk to everything in a single small area, you end up with less traffic and less need for parking in the first place (about half the parking and a quarter the traffic). The courthouse area needs to be such a “park once” district.

In this Washington Post article, former mayor Larry Giammo repeats some of the discredited mantras about parking: “a larger courthouse at the old library site would increase demand for parking in downtown Rockville, potentially hurting merchants.” As Pasadena discovered, increasing demand for parking can help merchants rather than hurt them when meters are priced appropriately so that shoppers can find spaces, and when the meter revenue itself is used to improve the streetscape, making the area around the stores more attractive.

In Another letter, by Rockville Central blogger Frank Anastasi, repeats even more parking myths worth refuting. “[T]he vast majority of people who will have business at the courthouse will have to find a way to get there without any nearby parking,” writes Anastasi. “[T]he surrounding residential neighborhood streets will be gridlocked all day long with people driving round and round and round looking for courthouse parking that doesn’t exist.”

Those effects will only happen if Rockville misses the chance to manage parking in a positive way. Boulder implemented a program where visitors would also have to pay to use the residential parking near the commercial district (while it remained free or cheap to residents), ensuring that people didn’t over-use the parking and that there were always available spaces. The money generated benefited the surrounding neighborhoods. As Jason Schrieber said at last week’s parking policy presentation, it was amazing how supportive the residents became when the money benefited their community.

The same progressive parking policies could allow Rockville to place its courthouse in a sensible location, avoid building lots of new parking, and still minimize the impact on residents and traffic. I don’t know all the details of the other merits of the library site versus the city’s proposed alternative. Maybe the other site is better, maybe not. But parking isn’t the reason. Too often, the battle lines over development are drawn between developers and city officials who want density and residents afraid of traffic. The two don’t have to go hand in hand anymore.