Parking Madness: Federal Way vs. Montreal

We’re just getting started with Parking Madness 2016 — our annual hunt for North America’s worst parking craters. So far, Washington, D.C., and Rutland, Vermont, have advanced to the second round.

Today’s matchup pits the Seattle suburb of Federal Way against the pride of Quebec — Montreal. It’s the second Canadian parking crater in this year’s competition, reminding us that the United States doesn’t hold a monopoly on hideous parking scars.

Federal Way

fed_way_parking
Federal Way is a city of 92,000 located along the highway between Seattle and Tacoma. An anonymous reader sent this satellite image with orange outlines denoting surface parking. The red outline marks the Federal Way Transit Center, a hub for buses bound for Seattle and Tacoma. A 7.8-mile light rail extension from Seattle is slated to serve this area, which is barely more than a collection of surface parking lots.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s the abundance of opportunities for transit-oriented development near the future light rail station. But you could easily end up with a much worse scenario in which the parking crater survives as a gigantic park-and-ride lot.

Montreal

Screen Shot 2016-03-09 at 4.19.58 PM

Submitted by Felix Gravel, this is the area around the city’s main intercity and commuter rail station. Surface parking lots are in red.

According to Wikipedia, the station serves 18 million passengers a year. Way to welcome them to the city!

Which parking crater is worse? Vote below.

Which city has the worst parking crater?

  • Federal Way (67%, 155 Votes)
  • Montreal (33%, 76 Votes)

Total Voters: 231

parking_madness_2016

  • J

    I think Montreal’s is way worse (downtown, transit adjacent), but it’s rapidly giving way to new construction, so the crater may not exist in a few more years.

  • Ex-Montrealais

    Actually a good number of these already have been redeveloped into fancy condos such as this one http://lelowney.prevel.ca/fr/ The picture must be a couple years old.

  • Under all of this in Montreal is Autoroute Ville-Marie. You can see a few of the on-ramps sticking out. Even a well capped freeway can have significant anti-urban effects, both by leaving large areas of undevelopable land dumping traffic.

  • Matt Robare

    Gotta give it to Montreal. They ought to know better.

  • Stewart Clamen

    Hey, my father’s office building is in that Montreal photo!

  • Stewart Clamen

    We need some current reconnaissance. Can someone send Google’s satellite over so we have accurate info? 🙂

  • Stewart Clamen

    Ftr, the parking lot tagged red in the lower right corner of the photo is a multi-story parking structure above the Central Train Station. Not a crater.

  • Stewart Clamen

    Here’s the actual crater that was overbuilt in the early 40s 🙂

    http://www.trainweb.org/oldtimetrains/photos/cnr_electric/MRT_gallery.htm

  • neroden

    The expressway (Autoroute Bonaventure), with the additional road on top of it (and on both sides of it further south) gives Montreal that extra edge in awfulness. The walkshed south of Central Station is ruined.

    Try going east on Rue Ottawa from Rue Ann to Rue Duke. Road, parking, road, parking, railway overpass, parking, another road, expressway overpass with parking, another road. It’s 212 metres of nothing but cars all around you. I bet nobody walks there.

  • neroden

    Autoroute Bonaventure would have to be sunk, closed, or capped in order to really eliminate the crater.

  • Wilfried84

    Judging by Google Earth, Federal Way looks like it consists almost entirely of cul de sac developments and giant parking lots. They get my vote.

  • A Tree

    I have to vote for Federal Way. At least in Montreal, if you wanted to walk you could. In Federal Way walking that area would be hell.

  • Little Red

    Federal Way is a no-brainer. They would need to blow up the whole place and start over to be only twice as bad as Montreal.

  • iSkyscraper

    Every one of those surface lots in Montreal is fast becoming a condo – the entire area is currently awash in cranes and construction hoarding. This isn’t even close.

    It’s nice that Streetsblog is now covering Canadian cities, but putting downtown Montreal and Vancouver in this competition is silly, unless you are using a time machine to go back to the 1970s. (Toronto would have cleaned up back then, but good luck finding a surface lot downtown now after 20 years of nonstop condo development). Big Canadian cities are generally the poster children for higher transit modal share, underground parking and livable city centers. That’s not to say there are not many examples of parking craters in Canada, but the suburbs and northern, smaller cities would be better examples.

  • iSkyscraper

    But isn’t Autoroute Bonaventure in this area being completely removed and rebuilt as an urban boulevard, similar to NYC’s former West Side Highway?

    Looks like they are well on their way to making big improvements here.

  • iSkyscraper
  • iSkyscraper
  • Jake

    The condo boom in Montreal is nothing like Vancouver/Toronto. The island of Montreal has actually been losing population and hollowing out to the suburbs. Montreal has made way more urban planning mistakes than other large Canadian cities when it comes to highway construction, and transit mode share is high but is stagnant/dropping. Montreal should win this round, a huge, dense, historical chunk of the city was flattened and turned into parking for those lots and for the Bonaventure expressway, which makes it much sadder.

  • chetshome

    Looking at the satellite view of Federal Way is very depressing. The crater photo seems to capture the entirety of the city’s business district. It’s a giant parking crater surrounded by cul-de-sacs. yikes

  • iSkyscraper

    Except for the fact that in this case it was the rail yard that did much of the original flattening, and that Montreal is now undoing their past highway damage on this very spot:

    http://dailycommercialnews.com/Infrastructure/News/2015/8/Montreals-Bonaventure-Expressway-coming-down-1009611W/

  • neroden

    News Link? That would be GREAT news.

    Is it this? I don’t read French.
    http://projetbonaventure.ca/projet/la-vision/

    It doesn’t seem to be a committed project, just a vision… if you have news that it’s actually being *done* that would be great.

  • iSkyscraper

    It’s real, and it’s spectacular. See photos of demoliton:

    http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/demolition-of-bonaventure-expressway-begins

  • nullbull

    Hooo boy, Federal Way.. wow. I would love to see the parking requirements for commercial developments in their code. Ugh.

  • Ben

    Montreal has not been losing population and hollowing out to the suburbs, it’s growing at a healthy rate : http://ville.montreal.qc.ca/portal/page?_dad=portal&_pageid=6897,67887840&_schema=PORTAL

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

Parking Madness Elite Eight: Washington vs. Federal Way

By Angie Schmitt |
The parking crater pretenders are gone and the competition is heating up as we enter the second round of Streetsblog’s fourth annual Parking Madness tournament. Eight echoing voids remain in the running for the Golden Crater. Today’s match features two very intense but very different parking disasters. Let’s dig in. Federal Way This is Federal Way, Washington, a city of about 90,000 residents between Seattle […]

Parking Madness Final Four: Federal Way vs. Dallas

By Angie Schmitt |
Villanova is taking on UNC tonight, but the main event is here on Streetsblog, with the first Final Four match of Parking Madness 2016. Streetsblog readers have narrowed this year’s field of 16 down to four parking abominations in these cities: Niagara Falls, Louisville, Dallas, and Federal Way, Washington. Your votes will determine who gets into the […]

Parking Madness 2016 Championship: Federal Way vs. Louisville

By Angie Schmitt |
This is it, folks. We started out with 16 parking craters in this year’s Parking Madness tournament, and just two remain: the asphalt-dominated downtown of Federal Way, Washington, and the grey parking lots in the SoBro section of Louisville, Kentucky. Louisville scored a major upset yesterday, beating many commenters’ pick to win it all, downtown Niagara Falls, New York. Meanwhile, Federal Way […]

Parking Madness Elite Eight: Wilkes-Barre vs. Louisville

By Angie Schmitt |
The final spot in the Final Four is up for grabs today, as we conclude the second week of the 2016 Parking Madness tournament. So far, parking craters in Dallas, Niagara Falls, and Federal Way, Washington have advanced to this elite stage of the competition. In today’s matchup, a waterfront parking crater in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, goes up […]

Parking Madness Final Four: Kansas City vs. Rochester

By Angie Schmitt |
The hunt for the worst parking crater on earth nears its epic conclusion with the second Final Four match of Parking Madness. Today’s matchup features a formidable entry from Kansas City and the upstart parking crater from Rochester, New York, which knocked out Detroit in the previous round. The winner will take on Jacksonville tomorrow for […]