I’m sure that we can all close our eyes and picture our “favorite” parking lots in Downtown Buffalo. Mine are in the Cobblestone District – the lots appear to be a sea of asphalt as far as the eye can see. Unfortunately, the lots reside where once turn of the century buildings stood. While we can’t bring back what we have lost, we can certainly move forward and build significant and useful buildings upon these vast expanses, a la Pegulaville. In order to paint a picture of the parking lot dilemma, one BRO reader has pointed out the downfalls associated with giant parking lots.
Submitted by JF:
[There is an] Interesting article in CityLab (formerly The Atlantic Cities) regarding parking craters (see here). Also see this link to Rochester’s winning the 2014 Golden Crater award.
It’s particularly bad in large Texas cities. Look at the downtown in Houston (see here) and Dallas (see here) – amazing percentage of their space used for surface lots. Just weird for a large metropolis to have a downtown that looks like a suburban mall.
Check out the Parking Craters video from Streetsblog – the blog pitted 16 of the worst parking offending cities against each other in a sweet 16-style tournament. One thing is for certain, and that is… Buffalo is not alone when it comes to having its fair share of Parking Craters.