It’s Washington vs. Burlington in the Parking Madness 2016 Tip Off!

Welcome to Parking Madness, Streetsblog's annual Sweet 16 tournament of parking craters. What's a parking crater? Simply put, it's a depression in the cityscape, a void where car storage has usurped land that should be devoted to buildings.

This is the fourth year Streetsblog readers have submitted more than enough entries to field a 16-crater bracket. Thanks to everyone who nominated a crater -- if we could accept them all we would, but there are just too many downtown parking scars to put them all in the competition.

Entries advance through the tournament by beating other parking craters in a reader vote. Today's match-up is practically ripped from the headlines: Burlington, Vermont, where Bernie Sanders served as mayor in the 1980s, goes up against Washington and the parking crater at the epicenter of the American political establishment.

First up: Burlington.

Here's an overhead shot of the area where Main Street meets South Winooski Avenue.

Brendan Hogan submitted this entry. He writes:

The block north of Main and east of Winooski used to contain a market, a school, a church, and other building, as you can see in this historical map Hogan provided:

Definitely ugly.

But can it top Washington D.C.'s Capitol parking lots? Let's see:

Dan Malouff, who writes the Beyond DC blog, submitted this beauty. He says:

Former Streetsblog writer Payton Chung, who blogs at West North, followed up with this observation:

All right, now it's up to you to tell us which one deserves to advance to the next round. Come back tomorrow and every weekday for the rest of March to get your daily fix of parking crater face-offs.