Parking Craters: Scourge of American Downtowns from STREETFILMS on Vimeo.
It might be one of the most common answers people give when asked what their city’s downtown needs: more parking.
But there is a price cities pay in trying to accommodate the thousands of cars that come in and out of downtown cores around the country everyday. Parking lots have high costs to a city’s landscape, architecture, management and environment. It’s a concept called a parking crater. This is when an urban parking lot is placed in the middle of a downtown core, leaving a crater-like hole in a city’s landscape.