Recent Streetsblog CHICAGO posts about parking

Portland Tackled Disabled Parking Placard Abuse, and It’s Working

By Angie Schmitt | Aug 6, 2014 | No Comments

Disabled parking placards used to be ubiquitous in Portland. Until very recently, the city provided unlimited free street parking to placard holders, estimated at a $2,000 annual value. Many cars bearing these placards would remain in prime spots for weeks or months without moving. In some parts of the city, cars with placards would occupy […]

Re-imagining Parking Spaces as Micro-Apartments

By Angie Schmitt | Jul 14, 2014 | No Comments

Can parking spaces get a second life? A student project in Atlanta helps demonstrate the possibilities in every stall. Students at the Savannah College of Art and Design created three “SCADpads:” 135-square-foot micro-apartments designed to fit in the space defined by a single parking spot. Three prototypes for these modular homes, which cost $40-$60,000 to […]

Be Jealous of São Paulo’s Precedent-Setting New Parking Policy

By Angie Schmitt | Jul 10, 2014 | No Comments

It may not be much consolation after yesterday’s World Cup defeat to Germany, but Brazil should feel at least a twinge of national pride over the groundbreaking new parking policies its largest city has adopted. Late last month, leaders in Sao Paulo approved a strategic master plan that will go a long way toward making […]

Wicker Park Counts Up Better Ways to Use Its 11,650 Parking Spaces

By Payton Chung | Jul 2, 2014 | 4 Comments

Every Saturday night at dusk, the main streets in Wicker Park and Bucktown seize up. The stalled lines of cars don’t just infuriate drivers — they also stall buses, block crosswalks, and push cyclists into the dangerous door zone. These crowds don’t descend out of nowhere to watch the sunset, or to pile into shows […]

Who Will Preserve Our Nation’s Urban Parking Lots?

By Angie Schmitt | Jun 30, 2014 | No Comments

A historic preservation group in Cincinnati put together the above video, meant to make us think critically about some of the most fiercely guarded yet least loved places in our cities: parking lots. Kudos to the Cincinnati Preservation Collective for bravely defending the spaces that help make Cincinnati much like every other mid-sized city in […]

STREETFILMS

Parking Craters: Scourge of American Downtowns

By Clarence Eckerson Jr. | Jun 4, 2014 | No Comments

Streetsblog’s Angie Schmitt popularized the term “parking crater,” defined simply as “a depression in the middle of an urban area formed by the absence of buildings.” Various types of “meteors” left behind parking craters in the 20th century — sprawl subsidies, highway building, the erosion of manufacturing. Whatever the cause, parking craters destroy sections of […]

1611 West Division Proves High-Rises Don’t Need Parking to Succeed

By John Greenfield | May 14, 2014 | 49 Comments

Last week I reported that the Belmont-Clark tower, located a block from a Red Line station, may include 90 rental units but only 39 parking spaces. A commenter scoffed, “Good luck renting those apartments when they run out of parking spaces.” However, the 1611 West Division rental tower, which opened last year next to the […]

Tulsa’s First Open Streets Event Reimagines Notorious Parking Crater

By Angela Serratore | May 6, 2014 | No Comments

Typically, no one goes to the southern end of downtown Tulsa to socialize. This part of town has been so overrun with parking lots that Streetsblog readers crowned it the worst “parking crater” in the country in our first Parking Madness competition last year. But last Sunday, thousands of people gathered smack in the middle […]

Eyes on the Street: Sidewalks Are For Walking, Not Parking

By Daniel Ronan | May 2, 2014 | 28 Comments

A springtime walk in the park, or down a sidewalk, should be simple and straightforward. Alas, there are some places around Chicago where someone out for a stroll instead has to dodge parked cars that plainly have no place within the sidewalk. These intrusions on pedestrian space don’t just rudely place dangerous moving cars within […]

A Huge Garage Doesn’t Belong on a Thriving Pedestrian Shopping Street

By Shaun Jacobsen | Apr 21, 2014 | 91 Comments

A parking lot at 3030 N Broadway in Lakeview, formerly the site of a Dominick’s grocery store, could soon be the home of a new development with a Mariano’s supermarket, an Xport Fitness health club, and four small retail tenants. This stretch of Broadway, designated as a Pedestrian Street by the city, is currently very […]

Parking Craters Aren’t Just Ugly, They’re a Cancer on Your City’s Downtown

By Payton Chung | Apr 10, 2014 | No Comments

Streetsblog’s Parking Madness competition has highlighted the blight that results when large surface parking lots take over a city’s downtown. Even though Rochester, winner of 2014’s Golden Crater, certainly gains bragging rights, all of the competitors have something to worry about: Cumulatively, the past 50 years of building parking have had a debilitating effect on […]

Eyes on the Street: Windy City Limousine Blocks Downtown Bike Lanes

By Steven Vance | Apr 3, 2014 | 15 Comments

As if bicycling downtown, where there is little space to safely pedal, wasn’t hard enough, private limo bus company Windy City Limousine frequently blocks bike lanes on Franklin Street outside Walgreens and Orleans next to the Merchandise Mart. Brian Elmore bicycle commutes from Madison Street and Wacker Drive to Ukrainian Village by taking the bike […]

Load more stories