14 Photos That Prove We Have Too Much Parking—Even on Black Friday

 

Black Friday shoppers are going local or buying online, leaving more and more big store parking lots nearly empty on the biggest shopping day of the year. Americans say all this land could be used for something much greater.

As I was refreshing (and refreshing) my browser to see all the #BlackFridayParking posts from across the U.S. and Canada, something stood out to me: Every single picture—every single video—looked like it could have been from my own community.

I’ve included a few pictures of my own Black Friday Parking audit so you can compare them to the images that flooded Instagram and Twitter today. There’s a good reason they look so similar: the broken development pattern that produced my place also afflicts these communities.

There was more than enough room in the Kohl’s/Petco parking lot to hold another piece of broken infrastructure—a fallen streetlight.

Parking mandates produce a lot of problems for our places. They spread destinations far apart, making them difficult to access without a long commute in a car. They lock up land that could be used to create wealth under pavement. They place limits on what small business owners and developers can do to offer the community more services and homes, limiting tax revenue for cities along the way.

A Simple Battle Cry

Although the built environment in my place might look similar to yours, many of the issues Strong Towns advocates discuss don’t come with standard solutions, ones that will work for every place. The waste parking mandates produces does have a standard, simple solution.

#BlackFridayParking isn’t just an awareness campaign. It’s a call to action for cities across North America: end parking mandates. Because when it comes to parking policy, there is a solution that will make communities better off. Allow places to build the right amount of parking, rather than conform to an arbitrarily derived minimum.

Because we want to replace all of this with resilient, prosperous places.

 
 
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Featured
Lauren Ronnander
Lauren Ronnander

Lauren Ronnander, the Director of Communications for Strong Towns, is an actual idealist who loves making things and double-spacing the end of sentences. Before joining the Strong Towns team in 2020, she worked as a journalist and an editor. She lives with her husband and an almost uncountable number of animals (including cats, dogs, sheep, chickens, and rabbits) in a super-awesome neighborhood in the American Midwest. Her experience in the Alaska Bush, downtown living in an up-and-coming Midwestern city, and now residing in a rural Chippewa Valley, Wisconsin, community has provided her with precious insight into the many ways our places can grow stronger.

 
#BlackFridayParking, Top Story, Community StoriesLauren Ronnanderparking minimums, end parking mandates and subsidies, #blackfridayparking