It’s Parking Madness Time — Send Us Your Parking Disasters!

It’s March and that means it’s Parking Madness season at Streetsblog. Today we’re launching our fifth annual tournament in search of North America’s worst parking blight, and we’re switching things up a little.

In previous years, the Parking Madness competition was open to pockmarked downtowns, asphalt-covered waterfronts, and sad windswept parking craters of all stripes. This year we’re looking for something more specific: crazy amounts of parking near transit stations.

Transit systems work best when they make places more walkable. If people can easily walk to transit, more people can ride, and fewer people will need to drive. But a lot of transit stops are surrounded by surface lots and parking decks. They repel pedestrians, generate more car traffic than foot traffic, and drain transit agency resources that could be used to run more trains and buses instead.

We need to do better — hence this exercise in public shaming. Streetsblog is looking for 16 of the most indefensible parking-saturated transit stations to populate this year’s Parking Madness bracket. Nominations in urban settings will have a better shot at making the cut than suburban park-and-rides.

To nominate an entry, send visual evidence, the precise location, and a written description of why it’s so bad to angie (at) streetsblog (dot) org, or leave the information in the comments. To be eligible, the entry must be in a North American city and cannot have competed in previous years — you can check here, here, here, and here. Entries are due March 10.