parking

Veteran Sun-Times reporter’s Fran Spielman’s recent piece on Mayor Emanuel’s plan to raise the city’s parking garage tax was a classic example of windshield-perspective journalism.

Disabled parking placards used to be ubiquitous in Portland. Until very recently, the city provided unlimited free street parking to placard holders, estimated at a $2,000 annual value. Many cars bearing these placards would remain in prime spots for weeks or months without moving.

Can parking spaces get a second life? A student project in Atlanta helps demonstrate the possibilities in every stall.

It may not be much consolation after yesterday's World Cup defeat to Germany, but Brazil should feel at least a twinge of national pride over the groundbreaking new parking policies its largest city has adopted.

Every Saturday night at dusk, the main streets in Wicker Park and Bucktown seize up. The stalled lines of cars don't just infuriate drivers -- they also stall buses, block crosswalks, and push cyclists into the dangerous door zone. These crowds don't descend out of nowhere to watch the sunset, or to pile into shows at the Double Door. No, this dangerous mess stems in large part from poorly managed public parking.

A historic preservation group in Cincinnati put together the above video, meant to make us think critically about some of the most fiercely guarded yet least loved places in our cities: parking lots.

Last week I reported that the Belmont-Clark tower, located a block from a Red Line station, may include 90 rental units but only 39 parking spaces. A commenter scoffed, “Good luck renting those apartments when they run out of parking spaces.” However, the 1611 West Division rental tower, which opened last year next to the Division Blue Line stop, shows that new residential buildings near transit with little or, in this case, no tenant parking can be a big success.

Typically, no one goes to the southern end of downtown Tulsa to socialize. This part of town has been so overrun with parking lots that Streetsblog readers crowned it the worst "parking crater" in the country in our first Parking Madness competition last year.