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 has routed competitors from the Mid-Atlantic, Quebec, and Texas en route to the final.
Which of these two deserves the Golden Crater? Use your last vote wisely.
Federal Way
Between Seattle and Tacoma lies Federal Way. Believe it or not, this "downtown" is already a transit hub with frequent bus service to Seattle. And it's about to get a new light rail station (site outlined in red), thanks to an eight-mile, $1.5 billion expansion project.
Trouble is, walking to the train isn't going to be an attractive option. The area is a nightmare for pedestrians, with wide streets that don't work for anyone outside a car. As you can imagine, the sea of parking lots and all those curb cuts just make the situation worse.
Unless some walkable, mixed-use development sprouts here, it's not a great place for a big transit investment. But park-and-ride seems to be the name of the game -- in addition to the 1,200-car garage that you can see in the photo outlined in yellow, another 1,000 structured parking spaces will be built to serve the light rail station.
Making matters worse, Sound Transit passed over a different alignment for this rail line that would have had five stops and much better transit-oriented development potential. Instead the agency chose a route along Interstate 5 that terminates at this location, with two other stops. A big factor behind that decision was NIMBY resistance to locating transit stations in more walkable areas with less parking.
A spokesperson for the Federal Way mayor's office, however, assures us that some transit-oriented development projects are coming to this area. So there's that.
Louisville
By now you're probably familiar with this parking bleakness in the Louisville neighborhood known as "SoBro" -- South of Broadway, just south of downtown.
Branden Klayko of the blog Broken Sidewalk made his case for this parking crater like so:
You can see in the upper left corner, the castle looking building is Louisville's old train station and now the headquarters of TARC, the city's transit agency. And it's completely surrounded by parking lots. SoBro connects Downtown with the leafy neighborhood of Old Louisville, with few parking lots and many Victorian mansions, but it serves as a sort of pedestrian/cyclist no-man's land that creates a flat wall of sorts between the two areas. SoBro is home to a couple colleges and Louisville's Main Branch public library, but here you'd never guess people existed at all.
The area suffered a lot, Klayko says, when the widening of Ninth Street, the street with a green median in the photo, "split Downtown from the predominantly black Russell neighborhood and created what is locally called the 'Ninth Street Divide,' a major problem still dividing the city today."
Here's a historic photo of what used to be, taken during a devastating flood in 1937:
As they say, "You don't know what you've got till it's gone."
This is the last vote of this year's tournament and we'll be keeping the polls open for two days. Weigh in before Friday at noon to determine the winner of the 2016 Golden Crater -- and with it, a friendly reminder to make smarter decisions in the future.
