Parking Madness 2016 Championship: Federal Way vs. Louisville

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

fed_way_parking

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

21f7143d-98f0-491b-ac63-ade6d11c6e04

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:

unnamed-11

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.

Which city has the worst parking crater?

View Results

parking_madness_2016

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

Parking Madness Elite Eight: Wilkes-Barre vs. Louisville

|
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 […]

Your 2016 Parking Madness Champion Is… Louisville!

|
Streetsblog readers spent the past three weeks voting in Parking Madness, the single elimination tournament where cities compete for the Golden Crater — a symbol of the shameful amount of space we’ve allowed surface parking to consume in our communities. We started with a field of 16 and now we have a champion. The winner of this year’s Golden Crater […]

Parking Madness Final Four: Niagara Falls vs. Louisville

|
Only three cities are left in the running for the Golden Crater in Parking Madness 2016. Today’s matchup will determine which insane parking will take on Federal Way, Washington, in the championship match. Read up on the case for these two semi-finalists and vote below. Niagara Falls Niagara Falls is stunning, isn’t it? This is downtown, just a few […]

Parking Madness: Louisville vs. Troy

|
So far Streetsblog readers have voted on seven head-to-head matchups in our 2016 Parking Madness tournament. Soon we’ll be down to the Elite Eight of parking craters. (You can still vote in the Long Beach vs. Muncie poll, which we’re extending to account for the holiday weekend in California.) But first, there’s one more pair of asphalt horrors in the running […]

Parking Madness: Louisville vs. San Diego

|
This week we’re really getting into the thick of our Parking Madness tournament, the hunt for the worst parking crater in an American downtown. Today’s match-up features a Kentucky river city that has done a number on its downtown and a California beach city with a weak spot for asphalt: It’s Louisville versus San Diego! […]

“Elite Eight” Parking Madness: Louisville vs. Houston

|
NCAA basketball has nothing on the drama, the intrigue, the heartbreak of a competitive parking crater tournament. We’re now into the “Elite Eight” round of Parking Madness, and today’s winner will join Dallas in the Final Four. It’s going to be a fierce competition between Louisville and Houston. Louisville’s downtown, you’ll recall, looks like this: […]