Transportation
Counting Parking Spots, From Above
Researchers at the University of Connecticut undertake a painstaking survey of parking infrastructure in cities
There is no single, handy database that tracks the proliferation of parking spots in a city over time. A five-story parking garage goes in here, a surface lot there. A new development comes in, and zoning code mandates additional spots per housing unit or office desk (or per junkyard, pet cemetery or rifle range) [PDF].
"It’s easy to say on a project-by-project basis, 'Oh, here a parking lot went in because of that project,'" says Chris McCahill, a doctoral candidate in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Connecticut. "Our idea was to look at the huge city-wide scale. What happens to a city when, project by project, that happens?"