Detroit

Yesterday, Chicago's United Center parking lots bested Denver's Court Place parking crater in the first match-up of Parking Madness 2014. Today, two heavyweights are facing off: It's the motor city versus sprawl city in a bare-knuckle brawl of car infrastructure run amok.

Detroit, the country's 18th largest city, has seen its transit system shrink to the point where few people can rely on it to get to work. The situation got so bad that one young entrepreneur stopped waiting on the region's dysfunctional government agencies and started running private buses.

Perhaps you've read recently about the city of Detroit's financial woes. The pensions of public employees are on the chopping block and Detroit may have to sell masterpieces from its art museum as it negotiates bankruptcy proceedings.

This table, showing the top 10 U.S. cities where cycling is growing fastest, comes from a new report from the League of American Bicyclists that analyzes census data. Though the census only tracks bicycle commuting -- and thus understates how many people are cycling -- the results tell an interesting story about cycling trends.

Detroit's bicycle advocates have built a powerful tool for change in the annual Tour de Troit bike ride. This two-wheeled tour of the city's historic landmarks has grown to attract more than 6,000 riders, making it the largest bike ride in the state of Michigan.

This parking map of downtown Detroit has been making the rounds, following news of the city's bankruptcy. It's a striking image: Close to 40 percent of downtown Detroit's develop-able land is parking, local experts say.

The above map, produced by Data Driven Detroit, comes to us though the satirical Facebook page Michigan Needs More Parking. It shows downtown Detroit with parking highlighted in orange and red: garages in orange, surface lots in red.

Is sprawl holding back social mobility in America? Paul Krugman didn't mince words yesterday in a follow-up to a post he wrote soon after the Detroit bankruptcy was announced. In that initial blog post, he compared Detroit to Pittsburgh and concluded that it wasn't just the loss of manufacturing jobs that hurt Detroit -- it was also the dispersement of jobs away from the city core. Yesterday, in a column titled "Stranded by Sprawl," he took the argument further, arguing, "Sprawl may be killing Horatio Alger."

It wasn't de-industrialization that bankrupted Detroit, wrote Paul Krugman in a New York Times column yesterday. If that was all there is to it, then how do you explain the fact that Pittsburgh, once so dependent on the steel industry, is now recovering? No, what brought Detroit to this low point, more than the loss of factory jobs, was decades of unsustainable development patterns.