My city had been pulled down, reduced to parking spaces

April 6, 2023 2:29 PM

Parking Lot Map. This map shows you how much of the downtown land of 50 major US cities is taken up by parking lots . The loser is Arlington, Texas, where 42% of downtown land is taken up by parking. The map comes from the Parking Reform Network, which seems like a balanced part of your recommended daily allowance of urbanist activism.
posted by gentlyepigrams (31 comments total)

Chicago: 4%. Rock on Chicago!
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:39 PM on April 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

Arlington TX is a weird one because they have a relatively tight grid indicating it's probably pretty old, and some university (University of Texas in Arlington) but lots of huge lots to service it. It says it has a student population of 40k, but must be one serious commuter college, because there is nowhere near enough infrastructure around to support that many students.

It's also probably under counted for parking, and only counting surface lots, because the apartments nearby have parking too.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:46 PM on April 6, 2023

Boston is listed at 6%, but I find the map somewhat suspect. For example, the Boston Public Market (near the Haymarket T stop) is labeled as a parking lot. In fact, it's a subterranean parking garage, underneath a full city-block market building. In the same vein, we've got a few places where it's a multi-story parking garage over a bunch of storefronts.

Yeah, it could be apartment buildings, office buildings, or something else, rather than parking, but it could also be...nothing.

There are very few straight-up parking lots in downtown Boston.
posted by explosion at 2:51 PM on April 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Fargo's not big enough to show up on there but the 80s were a series of events where a building downtown burned down, then before the owner could rebuild (or even get their insurance filed) the city eminent domain'ed the smoldering hole and paved it over to become a parking lot because they misguidedly thought the reason nobody shopped downtown was because the big mall had more parking...and not that the storefronts were being lost at an alarming rate.

About 20 years ago, a company started by our current governor began buying up buildings downtown for peanuts and gentrifying it. At first it seemed a folly but in the last five, ten years things are coming together -- they stopped making expensive retail spaces for boutique shops and bar/restaurants, and started building parking ramps and apartment buildings, so downtown is actually starting to be a liveable place now.
posted by AzraelBrown at 2:57 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Toronto's not going to be on there, obviously, but while there's what I would (as a car owner) consider no shortage of parking in the city it's not as bad as it used to be (1979 pic of the CN Tower and surrounding area, which was a wholllle lotta parking lots).
posted by The Card Cheat at 3:11 PM on April 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think it’s important to recognize urban policy like this as a subsidy for the automotive and petroleum industries.
posted by mhoye at 3:12 PM on April 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

while searching Detroit (surprising) this little qoate was at the bottom:
"The twin gods of Smooth Traffic and Ample Parking—have turned our downtowns into places that are easy to get to but not worth arriving at.”

-Jeff Speck
posted by clavdivs at 3:17 PM on April 6, 2023 [19 favorites]

It says it has a student population of 40k, but must be one serious commuter college, because there is nowhere near enough infrastructure around to support that many students.

I'm pretty sure UT Arlington is primarily a commuter school. (I live in Dallas.)
posted by gentlyepigrams at 3:21 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Darn, no non-US cities.

Seeing SF on top is a little contradictory since its downtown has been completely devastated by remote working. There's not much there anymore.
posted by meowzilla at 3:27 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

The map of "central city" for San Francisco is extremely suspect.
posted by grumpybear69 at 3:30 PM on April 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

Downtown Seattle is 10% parking with by far the bulk of it near the stadiums, no surprise. I will say this, with the pandemic I spent most of my time on Capitol Hill. But it's gardening season and so far I have been to Rainier Lowes and Shoreline's Sky Nursery in search of flats of nightscented stock. And everywhere I went I took the bus out and Lyft back, what with the flats.

And everywhere I went, I went OMFG! JFHC! because it was high-rise megablocks all the way on both sides of Rainier and Aurora. Sometimes I did not recognize a thing for blocks. It was so disorienting. I've seen building booms here but this like concrete Jurassic Park instaboom on steroids
posted by y2karl at 3:37 PM on April 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

And Lake Forest City-Park-Way, too. If we line the stroads with housing and then prioritize buses on them and have parks in the quieter areas off-stroad maybe we can retrofit our layout after all?

They SAY 99 in Edmonds is getting actual protected bike lanes all the way through. Concrete-planters protected, maybe even! If 99 can do it surely anywhere can.
posted by clew at 4:14 PM on April 6, 2023

Funny story here... 13 years or so ago I read this post on this site and it inspired me to check out a copy of Shoup's book. A few years later I was doing parking reform in Portland and a few years after that I founded the Parking Reform Network. In a not insignificant way, MetaFilter is responsible for these maps!
posted by twjordan at 4:18 PM on April 6, 2023 [59 favorites]

I was going to grumble about the accuracy of the Atlanta map, but it's supercool to hear the backstory and Metafilter connection, so I won't. Thanks, twjordan for these cool maps!

(Except to say that even though we have way too much parking in Downtown Atlanta, the real crime of the Atlanta map is the huge amount of land devoted to expressways.)
posted by hydropsyche at 4:51 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

So that would explain the shortage of parking!
posted by rubatan at 4:53 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ah my hometown. Some facts!

-UT is absolutely a commuter school.

-Arlington's mayor for a long time was Tom Vandergriff, as in the many Vandergriff car dealerships still making his family rich.

-Ironically many people I n my family who lived there and voted against any kind of transit because it would bring in "the wrong people" would later move further out into the country because the traffic was so bad
posted by emjaybee at 5:11 PM on April 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Boston is listed at 6%, but I find the map somewhat suspect.

More than somewhat - the Boston data is bullshit. Not only are they listing parking lots that don't exist, but their map excludes the majority of the residential part of the city (Back Bay, South End, etc.) that are largely absent of parking lots.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 5:31 PM on April 6, 2023

I had no idea about the Metafilter connection when I posted this. So cool!
posted by gentlyepigrams at 5:35 PM on April 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

I kind of suspect this is just a proxy for the cost of real estate. There comes a point where it's more lucrative to have a building with a garage beneath instead of a surface parking lot.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 7:25 PM on April 6, 2023

I think it’s important to recognize urban policy like this as a subsidy for the automotive and petroleum industries.

Which, in turn, exists largely to serve the white flight population who doesn't want to share mass transit with brown folks.

Ironically many people I n my family who lived there and voted against any kind of transit because it would bring in "the wrong people" would later move further out into the country because the traffic was so bad.

Yep. The stain of slavery runs deep in this country.
posted by AlSweigart at 8:45 PM on April 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Boston is listed at 6%, but I find the map somewhat suspect. For example, the Boston Public Market (near the Haymarket T stop) is labeled as a parking lot. In fact, it's a subterranean parking garage, underneath a full city-block market building. In the same vein, we've got a few places where it's a multi-story parking garage over a bunch of storefronts.

Underground lots are better than surface lots in that they don't directly make dense urban spaces impossible, but their second-order effects are not small and not good. Fundamentally, a parking garage attracts cars, so you get all the negatives that go along with them: geometric dominance over people walking & cycling, noise, air pollution, particulate pollution, road damage, disproportionate financial priority over other modes, and so on.

Here's the obligatory Not Just Bikes video touching on the subject. Timestamped to 13:17 where he discusses a canal-side project, but the part about the city-center garage is vital too.

The more parking you have, the more driving you have. I've heard anecdotally that people in this neighborhood [which eliminated on-street parking but built a parking garage] are now more likely to drive because of this parking garage. Before the garage was built the limited parking on the street would discourage people from taking their car as they might not be guaranteed a good spot when they return. But now that the garage has been built people are more likely to take their car, even for short trips.

Car infra be car infra. Half measures only entrench the problem.
posted by daveliepmann at 1:39 AM on April 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

Arlington is home to AT&T Stadium, the Ball Park at Arlington and Globelife Field (which share existing parking and expanded parking with Texas Live. It is also home to Six Flags Over Texas, and Six Flags Hurricane Harbor.

Add in several malls and our traditional love of huge shopping centers with tons of parking for our giant trucks.

As Arlington is situated between Dallas and Fort Worth, and there are no easily accessible methods of public transportation, it's just going to have a lot of parking. They even make dropping off a Lyft/Uber rider difficult during events. Parking is one of Arlington's "side hustles".

Gross.
posted by lextex at 3:02 AM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

As Arlington is situated between Dallas and Fort Worth, and there are no easily accessible methods of public transportation, it's just going to have a lot of parking.

It's infamously the largest city in the US without any significant public transportation. And it's median income and educational attainment is far below the northern suburbs, so whoops about that 'wrong kind of people' thing. It's also paradoxically one of densest cities (most uniformly dense) in Texas, far denser than any of the major cities.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:52 AM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

The major Texas cities obviously have dense neighborhoods (Houston has some that touch 40k per sq mile), but they also have way more sprawling single family homes so are less uniformly dense, so the uniform density of them is very low.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:55 AM on April 7, 2023

The data also really wrong for Cincinnati. Essentially most of the land south of the interstate to the river is underground garages. Restaurants and bars and apartments sit on top of them. The garages have to exists because that land floods from the river. Most of the garages aren't marked.

My employer has a privately owned parking garage. It isn't marked.

With that said there are way too many surface parking lots in a 15 minute walk of the center of Cincinnati.
posted by mmascolino at 12:33 PM on April 7, 2023

Nthing that the Boston map data is not confidence inspiring in accuracy. I can't quite tell what they were going for. If underground garages count, then they are missing lots of them. Also they missed some of the above ground lots I know about. Unless they were only counting public parking, in which case they marked some private lots as public. Also, given that they assume 25% of the land is roads and sidewalks, they should include a third or so of that towards parking, since in Boston most of the roads have parking on one or both sides.

To be clear, I do like their premise, and I'm glad Boston isn't as parking lot filled as it used to be.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 1:49 PM on April 7, 2023

The map of "central city" for San Francisco is extremely suspect.

Seems about right to me- that's where most of the tall buildings are, and it includes the Financial District. What would you change?
posted by oneirodynia at 2:22 PM on April 7, 2023

"We extracted all parking shapefiles from Open Street Maps to map all land primarily devoted to parking in our “Central City” focus area. Some cities were mapped extensively, while others had minimal mapping of their parking lots. We manually added all parking based on Google Maps satellite imagery. The goal was to find all land that’s primary purpose was parking passenger vehicles"

So as I understand it, "land that's primary purpose was parking passenger vehicles" means they intend to count surface lots and pure parking garages, but not an office over an underground garage.
posted by bfields at 2:45 PM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

The data also really wrong for Cincinnati.

The maps aren't perfect but describing them as "really wrong" kinda stings. We generally didn't include underground parking because, well, it's not visible from overhead images, and it's usually not the primary use of the land.

Similar complaints are the map is not accurate because a. 5 story parking structure has some retail on the ground floor... primary use is still parking.

That said there are some missed lots/garages in every city and some lots that are marked that aren't actually parking. We'll be refining these over time. It's most likely a wash. We had a big error on Detroit and it was a 3% difference in the total city coverage, so consider the margin of likely error to be a +/- a few percentage points. It's why we don't have any significant figures on the percentages.

The methodology is on the site... there's an email to send corrections. Don't miss the forest for the trees.
posted by twjordan at 2:50 PM on April 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

"Chicago: 4%. Rock on Chicago!"

At one time, the oft-maligned Richard J. Daly floated the idea of eliminating ALL personal vehicle driving and parking in the broadly defined downtown area. Would it've been a good idea to punt the parking lot problem to a farther largish ring around the center?
posted by Chitownfats at 11:53 PM on April 7, 2023

It might be interesting to read about parking in Tokyo. In order to own a car you have to have proof of a private parking spot. The dealer has to get this before you can take possession of the car, and compare it with your residence to verify that it is withing two kilometers of your residential address.

There is NO free parking whatsoever and the fines for illegal parking are magnificent. Fines range from 10,000 to 18,000 yen - 18,000 yen is roughly $134 US. And you have to pay the fine right away - as soon as you get the ticket you go to the police station to exchange the violation notice for a payment notice, and then take the payment notice to the nearest bank. Failure to pay promptly starts adding additional penalties. You don't want to leave it until Friday unless you intend to pay an eye-watering amount.

And then there is my old neighbourhood, Westmount, a borough in Greater Montreal. In order to preserve the greenery in the neighbourhood you are not allowed to convert land that is not already paved into paved land. Many very nice homes were built with either only one parking spot or none at all as extensive parts of the district were built in 1920 or earlier. There IS on street parking without parking meters - but that is limited to just four hours before you have to move your car to avoid a ticket, and you have to pay a yearly fee and register your plate to even be allowed to do that. For overnight parking you can simply register your plate number before 11 PM each night and then you don't have to move it until seven AM. I would hate to be a car owner there, but that is the idea.

I remember as a kid sometimes getting to the bus stop on Sherbrooke Street and looking up the street to see my bus vanishing in the distance. I had just missed it. And then I would look down the street in the other direction - and not infrequently the next bus would already be in sight. They were serious about public transit. During off hours you could often get a seat, but anytime people were out shopping, or commuting or clubbing it was safe to assume you would be standing and holding on to a pole. (I STILL cannot adjust to the buses in the small city where I now live. The bus driver won't set off again until you sit down and that just seems totally wrong. Sometimes I don't want to sit. I work sitting down. I'd be glad to stand on the bus, but no, that would be a safety violation.)
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:52 AM on April 12, 2023 [2 favorites]