Parking Madness: New York vs. Poughkeepsie
We're on to the second round in Parking Madness, Streetsblog's annual tournament devoted to shaming our national addiction to huge expanses of surface parking. This year's bracket exclusively features parking craters by transit stations -- and it's a crowded field.
There is one more undecided match from the first round: The poll for Hartford vs. Cleveland is open until tomorrow afternoon.
Today a small town commuter rail station takes on a big city subway stop in the first Elite Eight matchup.
Queens -- Willets Point/Citi Field
A subway line and a commuter rail stop both serve the site where the Mets play, which overcame a Norfolk, Virginia, parking crater in the first round of the tournament. Reader Hugh Shepard says it would be put to better use as badly needed housing.
As other readers pointed out, the site has been the subject of some fierce development battles. It was slated for a mega-mall until a court put a halt to that idea in 2012. Currently, Governor Andrew Cuomo envisions building a rail connection to LaGuardia Airport that starts here -- a project that's been roundly derided as a waste of money.
And guess what Cuomo wants to build here for the new transit connection? More parking, of course.
Poughkeepsie
This Poughkeepsie eyesore at the terminal station on Metro-North's Hudson Line beat out another Metro-North stop in Fairfield, Connecticut, in round one.
Jay Arzu, who submitted this site, says downtown Poughkeepsie has been decimated by parking lots, but the city has been working to redevelop this particular site. If that ever happens, it looks like a big improvement:
Clearly both of these sites could be so much more than parking lots. Which deserves the shame of making it to the Final Four?
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