Parking

Here's the rosy scenario of a future where cars drive themselves: Instead of owning cars, people will summon autonomous vehicles, hop in, and head to their destination. With fewer cars to be stored, parking lots and garages will give way to development, eventually bringing down the cost of housing in tight markets through increased supply. Pressure to expand roads will ease, as vehicle-to-vehicle technology allows more cars to use the same road space. Traffic violence will become a thing of the past as vehicles communicate instantly with each other and the world around them.

It's March, which can only mean one thing: Parking Madness time. Last year we asked our readers to help us crown the worst parking crater in an American city, and in that inaugural 16-entry bracket, Tulsa blew away the competition. But we know there are still plenty of other parking lots out there that make downtown look like a lunar landscape, so here comes the sequel.

Happy New Year, transit riders! Congress has a special present: Some of you will be getting a tax increase this year.

On Black Friday, Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns asked his Twitter followers to take pictures of parking lots on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. The evidence they returned was pretty damning: Retailers like Walmart, Kohl's, and Target -- some compelled by mandatory parking minimums -- provide way more parking than shoppers will ever demand. Marohn collected 70 pictures of wasted asphalt on this big shopping day.

Law professor Frank H. Buckley seems to want to be the next Dororthy Rabinowitz. That is, he wants to gain notoriety by clinging to old and unsafe street designs while, simultaneously, shoring up the Wall Street Journal's reputation as a bastion of change-averse curmudgeons. Done and done.

This post is the 17th and final post in the series: Parking? Lots! Alan Durning is the executive director of the Sightline Institute. 

This is the season climax, the culmination, the big reveal.

Alan Durning is the executive director of Sightline. This post is #15 in the Sightline series, Parking? Lots!

Tulsa, Oklahoma, is Streetsblog's reigning "Parking Madness" champion -- earlier this year readers said its downtown was scarred by the worst parking crater in America. It seemed at the time like Tulsa was going to take action to mend its downtown, but recent news has not been so encouraging. Will Tulsa enact a new surface parking moratorium or continue bulldozing the city to make way for surface parking? It could all rest with an upcoming City Council decision.