Time to Refresh our National Parking Map
Yes, that's a mostly empty parking lot and yes, this photo was taken on what's supposed to be the busiest shopping day of the year.
Who's excited for Black Friday? At Strong Towns, we're pumped—but not for the shopping deals. We're excited because the day after Thanksgiving is our annual Black Friday Parking event.
#BlackFridayParking is a nationwide event drawing attention to the harmful nature of minimum parking requirements which create a barrier for new local businesses and fill up our cities with empty parking spaces that don’t add value to our places.
Each year on Black Friday, one of the biggest shopping days of the year, we invite you to snap photos of the parking lots in your communities to demonstrate how unnecessary these massive lots are. Just upload your photos to social media with the hashtag #blackfridayparking. Learn more about how to participate.
Updating the Map
Last year on Black Friday, we introduced a crowdsourced map that you all helped us to create. The map (below) shows progress made on removing parking minimums across the continent. You can click on each pin to read more about what's happening in that city.
- Green pins = parking minimums completely eliminated in at least one area of the city
- Blue pins = parking minimums lowered or removed for certain uses
- Orange pins = currently discussing their parking minimum laws
Unfortunately, it's been a while since anyone submitted data for this map. No doubt, plenty of new cities should be added, and hopefully some of those blue and orange pins have changed to green over the past year.
Please take a few minutes to submit information about the parking minimums in your city via this short survey so that we can share an updated map during the week of Black Friday Parking.
We'd especially like to know if there have been positive changes in the status of parking minimums in your community. Thank you for your help in creating this national database on parking minimum removals.
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