Parking Madness: Philadelphia vs. Long Beach

The search is on for America’s Worst Parking Crater™ and today we’re getting to know two more contenders in the 2018 Parking Madness bracket.

Houston, Lansing, Providence, and Greenville have secured spots in the Elite Eight. Voting remains open in yesterday’s D.C. vs. Fremont match.

Today’s match: A gargantuan sports complex in Philadelphia takes on a college campus in Long Beach, California, that leaves a lot to be desired.

Philadelphia

The South Philadelphia Sports Complex came to our attention via an anonymous reader. This is a rare triple threat, housing Citizens Bank Park (home of the Phillies), Financial Field (home of the Eagles), and Wells Fargo Center (home of the 76ers).

Instead of working out some sort of shared parking arrangement for these venues, it looks like Philadelphia paved enough asphalt just in case all three teams play at the same time and no one takes the train. Most of the year, as you can see in this photo, most of this space isn’t even used.

“Sure, some of the parking lots have solar panels on them,” our contributor writes, “but that doesn’t excuse the awful urban design and unwalkability.”

Long Beach

Reader Michael Sullivan nominated this parking crater at the Cal State Long Beach campus. He writes:

Instead of building dormitories, the University campus chose to build 14,006 parking spaces for it’s roughly 30,000 students. It now wonders why it is perceived as a ‘commuter school.’

To top it off, one of the biggest, most prominent structures in the photo — the rectangular grey building left of the pyramid — is a parking garage.