did not expect to be jump scared by my hometown lol
Dude, me too! I didn’t see the title and thought the island looked familiar.
We could turn all that blue stuff on the map into more parking lots ya know
It’s perfectly shaped for a ten lane highway.
That green thing in the middle can be a toll booth
If we park all the cars there, we no longer need all the other parking lots, and we can narrow the roads to reclaim some RoW, lower speed limits.
wow, there’s so little city in this city… where are the people supposed to be?
In traffic
And people struggle understanding why I would prefer a shift from 6-2. Spokane traffic is why.
Just move literally anywhere in Europe. Fucking Bulgaria has better city planning than this insanity. And public transport!
The level of incompetence here is wild. 20 years ago Springfield MO was better than we do here.
It’s an embarrassment.
Spokane is a very sprawling city. It’s the second most populous in Washington but a third the density of Seattle. Including the “metropolitan area” of both Spokane is a seventh as densely populated.
Are there lots of parking lots because it’s sprawling or is it sprawling because there are a lot of parking lots?
A bit of both but the root is that land is comparatively cheap. Building out is economically incentivized over building up. Municipalities can put their thumb on the scale by raising land taxes based on acreage but zoning restrictions are the actual solution (and these tend to be unpopular because the immediate effect is that development costs rise and bring rents with them)
This looked so absurd that I had to look at the satellite view to believe it but it’s true. This planet has skin cancer and it’s us.
Bonus fun: Spokane’s city govt named a parking garage a historic building worthy of subsidizing for preservation. It also won an award for ‘excellence in use of concrete’. Spokane’s just that awesome.
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2025/oct/20/getting-there-spokanes-parkade-becomes-one-of-few-/
that’s not even the scariest part. Everyone drives through downtown likes it’s a highway. Not worth staying near the bars and food if you’re three feet from being slammed by a lifted truck going 50
My biggest complaints are the Thor/Freya on/off ramps and the Lincoln(?) offramp going west. They are way too short, and people can be idiots. Merging there sucks.
Lmaooo I love this kind of thing. How utterly you have fucked our cities
I can see there’s a lot of potential for parking space development on that island in the middle there.
And most of the cars that use that parking are in use for maybe 2-3 hours per day. The rest of the time they’re just taking up space.
We really need to get people to abandon personal cars. Even if everyone switched to electric cars we’d still need all this parking space. We’d also still have all the microplastic pollution from their tires.
There’s a catch 22 though. A lot of people feel like they need their cars because there’s no alternative. Because of that, they oppose any law that could make cities less car-centric because it makes it harder for them. But, that just means they continue to need their cars. I don’t know how that can be fixed.
Laws helped cause the parking lot issues.
Would honestly love to live in a building or neighborhood that maintains a fleet of cars to share. I can’t afford to operate a truck/van as a daily driver (and I honestly hate driving them), but I often find myself wishing I had a large vehicle to move stuff around in.
In many places there are car share services. Zipcar, Communauto, Flexicar, etc.
One with roads coloured too would probably also be informative. And I feel like this could be scripted with openstreetmaps to make them for different cities and compare them…
Thought this was that stock market chart for a second
All suburbs in PNW are like this. “Asphalt ocean”
This is city center. The park is nice. It was the 1974 world’s fair grounds, it’s a bunch of bridges over waterfalls and there’s been a decent amount of investment / upkeep the last few years.
The business owners in the 70s all opposed it’s construction because they didn’t think it would be good for downtown. Since then they’ve really doubled down on surface lots to charge people going to the park / mall / downtown businesses.
Not enough parking destroy more buildings and the there is still too much nature remaining its useless for the car industry.
Pave paradise and put up a parking lot
Is this a quote from somewhere specific? I like it.
It is from the lyrics of Big Yellow Taxi
Take heart that cities are capable of change, if they want to. So long as state government doesn’t get in the way.
I made a similar map to this for Spokane a few years back. I focused on downtown and it was bad.
Then I did one for North of the river. Holy moly it’s a sea of asphalt there.
