Parking Madness: Toronto vs. Malden, Massachusetts

It’s Parking Madness season at Streetsblog, and if you’re just joining us, this year’s competition is all about how we sabotage transit by surrounding stations with huge fields of parking.

On Friday, we kicked things off with a match between transit station areas in St. Louis and Sacramento, with St. Louis advancing.

Today, first round action continues as Toronto takes on the Boston suburb of Malden.

Toronto — Kennedy Station

Reader Ian Wood submitted the parking lots around Kennedy Station, which is the fifth busiest subway station in Toronto, according to Wikipedia.

The city has spent the last 25 years infilling parking lots like mad, and even its inner suburbs have seen wave after wave of densification.  (No city outside Asia has built more condos this century).

But Toronto is a young city, with a postwar rail system. While Toronto’s GO Transit is one of North America’s larger commuter rail stations, from the beginning it was designed as a car-to-train model, and most stations are surrounded by enormous parking lots, usually in the middle of highways and industrial areas.

This area is already surrounded by schools, housing, and job centres — and more is coming. But the subway station remains an odd crater in the middle of it.

Definitely the kind of space that would make Donald Shoup cry.

Malden, Massachusetts — Wellington T Station

An anonymous reader submitted this site outside Boston. Despite the picturesque setting by the Malden and Mystic rivers, the Wellington T station is hemmed in on all sides:

The station is sandwiched between a massive parking lot, a major highway and a train maintenance yard. There is also a parking garage just west of the station. I am not sure how anyone from the neighborhoods north get to this station on foot/bike.

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