Because I looked around and no one had done Hamilton:
http://i.imgur.com/6myDYzu.jpg
Red is parking. Burgundy is a large just abandoned lot (I think... it might be a poorly maintained park?)
Green is proposals. Light green is areas that I think have proposals, but I'm not certain.
Purple is the regional bus station, so technically surface parking, but not in the normal sense.

interesting thread, but I was wondering if all these maps are from the same elevation as that would make it easier to compare the cities.

Calgary is a very god example of how a new and very wealthy city can still have a vibrant core devoid of parking lots and disjointed centres.

Contrary to popular beleif there is actually quite a bit of parking in downtown Calgary but it is underground beneath the city's huge office towers..........out of sight ut of mind. This has resulted in the towers also being pedestrian friendly with shops and resturants at street level making for a constant urban form and connected downtown. There are very few parking lots in downtown Calgary despite having a lot of parking spaces.

Calgary also made some other progressive policies over the years. It started to apply HEAVY city taxes on downtown parking making it unappealing but built a comphrehensive LRT system so there were viable alternatives. It also left one street intact with it's heritage building........the Stephen Avenue pedestrian mall which is the busiest and most successful in Canada. It also decided to have a very centralized business location so you don't get office towers spread all over the city making transit service to them unreliable and inconvinient.

I was going to say: The parking is almost certainly there but out of site under office towers and limited to executives working in the towers. The oligarchs DO NOT ride public transit and even their chauffeur-driven cars need someplace to park while they are doing whatever they do to stay rich.

In car-hating San Francisco, it's a sick joke that our elected overlords, who spend their time making it ever harder to drive a private vehicle in the city, demand and get free parking at City Hall. But the captains of (service) industry do as well.

Here you can see them digging Mr. Benioff's parking at the base the tower (to the left in this shot) named for his company (Salesforce.com). When completed, it will be paved over as a public plaza--you'll never guess it's there.

https://scontent-sjc2-1.cdninstagram...92702464_n.jpg
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...99946&page=154

Which is why I said "otherwise they'd choose a cheaper place in the suburbs". I never said anything about Google needing to pay a premium for a downtown office location. I was just explaining why downtown office locations exist at all.

This might not be a popular opinion, but it seems a pragmatic option would be more parking garages, with first-floor retail and 'pretty' facades. Build these, let the surface lots get developed or turned into parks. Have big garages on the edge of the downtown, next to transit. Have lower rates (encourage people to park near, but not in downtown, reducing uneeded car traffic of people just looking to park), which would allow for streets to be geared more towards people, mass transit, etc.

It is not realistic in many metros to think everyone will magically be riding in from the suburbs on trams, so mitigate the car traffic to keep cars out of the central downtown, and then free up the space for the good stuff.

It isn't realistic to think changes will happen "magically" but that can be said of most things. That doesn't mean that changes can't happen with good planning and infrastructure investment. After all, it was planning and infrastructure investment choices that caused the current situation to begin with.

Since I created this thread forever ago, it would be cool to see how much these maps have changed since.

Denver is radically improved, to a lesser extent Houston would be too.

I am pretty sure Tulsa is exactly as bad as it was before.

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/vi...526557274&z=15

This development map of Downtown LA should help... A vast majority of the lots are gone (or will be shortly) from when this thread started

Toronto parking lot map 2018

Red indicates parking lots with no active proposals for development.
Blue indicates parking lots pictured on the map, but which have either been developed since the image was taken (probably early 2017) or which have current building proposals.

A few things to note: no distinction has been made between private and public parking lots - everything is fair game (including car dealerships, schools, hospitals, etc), except that I didn't include smaller "backyard" lots. Multi-level parking garages were also not included. And I kind of skipped over the vacant lots and parking of the Portlands (bottom right), which is set to be completely redeveloped - including changing the landfill itself and renaturalizing the river - but which is also still about a decade away. Otherwise, I was pretty thorough but may have still missed a few.


https://i.imgur.com/31xUfm5.jpg

Full size

^ Parking lots are disappearing at a dizzying rate in downtown Toronto.

Thanks for bringing this thread back to life, I just love it. A picture can say a thousand words and these maps really a lot about the vitality of a downtown and its challenges.

Ya, Toronto will basically be devoid of all parking wthin a decade at the most. Vancouver already is and in fact the downtown penninsula of Vancouver with about 100k no longers has even a gas station. Montreal is also nearly parking lot free and Ottawa is getting there as is Calgary.

Edmonton is the only major Canadian city that still has a lot of parking lots downtown. The city has filled up a lot of them recently with new office and a lot of new condo/apt towers but due to the sheer number of them it has a ways to go.

Seeing this thread started 7 years ago, it would be great if people could put up the original map and a new one to see how far {or not} cities have been able to draw residents back downtown and rejuvenate their cores.

Based on what most US cities have been, it just takes a long, long, long time.

Seattle for example. We've had booms in the early 80s, late 80s, late 90s, late 00s, and currently. There are still tons of parking lots. I'd guess 1/3 of what existed in the late 80s, but still many.

Long time on what timescale? Chicago has mopped up probably 50% of the downtown vacant lots since I moved here just 12 years ago. It seems one is being torn up every week nowadays...

Similar to that. Early booms cut the acreage incrementally but the current one is probably cutting it by half, or maybe 2/3 if it keeps going (I'm now guessing it's been faster than my last guess). Or let's say 2/3 from 2006 to 2018.

But it's like a half-life. In any boom, some land owners (half?) decide to wait for the next one, or they're absentees and don't even think about it, or they try to get a project together but fail.

Same for Houston. I'd say about half of the vacant lots (and there were a staggering amount) have been or are currently being developed since I moved here 20 years ago. There's still a lot and will probably take another 20 or so years to fill most of those out.