Parking Madness: Hicksville vs. Jersey City

5:16 PM EDT on April 4, 2018

We're pleased to present a thrilling intra-New York metro area battle in the the seventh match of Parking Madness 2018.

So far, the parking craters in Houston, Lansing, Providence, Greenville, and Fremont have advanced to the second round. Meanwhile, voting is still open in the Philadelphia vs. Long Beach competition.

Today's contenders prove that proximity to good transit that will whisk you to the largest concentration of jobs in America is no match for the scourge of parking craters. Take in the Hicksville vs. Jersey City action and don't forget to vote.

Hicksville

Hicksville, New York, is a hamlet on Long Island served by the Long Island Railroad. Not only does the rail station have an abundance of surface parking, there's also the gigantic suburban retail parking explosion a few short blocks away, featuring the Long Island Ikea, a Target, Chipotle, and other companies whose real estate formulas dictate that they must be surrounded by parking in a place like Hicksville, train or no train.

This crater was nominated by reader Shaul Picker, who writes:

Hicksville gets about 133 trains per day and is only about 40-50 minutes away from Penn Station. Instead there is a big crater of parking. To get to a talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson I had to take the LIRR to Hicksville and take a slow bus. At Hicksville I saw nothing but parking lots. You essentially have to walk through parking lots to get out of the station. There is so much potential here, but it is waste.

From the looks of things, most of that retail parking crater isn't occupied most of the time.

Jersey City

Behold, Jersey City: just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. And right up against its towers you have some very suburban parking lots and retail.

The anonymous reader who submitted this site writes:

While Jersey City may be the 28th densest place in America, that does not exempt it from having craters. There are several shopping centers all of which have their own parking lot. There is Newport Mall which has a parking deck the size of the mall (and is rarely full) There are ground floor parking garages hidden from the eagle's view which make the area lack store fronts and activity. (Also there are some small craters in Paulus Hook neighborhood just south of Newport.)

It's enough to make Donald Shoup cry.