Don’t Forget to Expose Your City’s Parking Failures This Black Friday

It’s that time of year again — time to show how much space we waste on commercial parking!

Strong Towns is organizing its annual #BlackFridayParking campaign, asking readers to snap photos of half-empty parking lots on one of the biggest shopping days of the year.

Vast parking lots and garage consume far too much space in our cities and towns. They make places unwalkable. Their impermeable surfaces generate runoff that pollutes our water. And they erode the fiscal viability of local governments by increasing infrastructure costs and weakening the tax base.

And yet, everywhere you look in America, enormous seas of parking are the norm at retail centers. The fact that many parking lots remain half-empty on Black Friday is proof that we’ve gone way too far with all this asphalt.

The Strong Towns contest is a chance to step back and call attention to this problem, so get your cameras ready and remember the #BlackFridayParking hashtag.