A visually and cartographically explicit narrative blog about Tampa's built history and development.
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Saturday, June 1, 2013

How does Tampa stack in U.S. parking stats?

A recent infographic has been circulating the interwebs that clearly compares parking requirements across major US cities, http://graphingparking.wordpress.com/.  Tampa is unfortunately one of the few cities on the list to boast a minimum number of required spaces for offices built within the central business district.  No wonder our downtown is awash with surface parking lots.  It is nice to see all four of the major Florida metros represented for a intra-state comparison.  Tampa is the worst of the four in office vs. parking space, third in dining vs. parking, and shown as first in residential vs. parking.  However the residential space graphic makes it appear as though Miami has a flat across the board requirement for residential parking spaces, while Tampa sets different standards for spaces allotted based on the number of bedrooms.

 

The City of Tampa boasts on its website that it is responsible for "11,372 off-street spaces and 2,097 on-street spaces" (numbers vary depending on which part of the city website you land on).  Searching through the City's code (linked to through the graphing parking website) I see that the only entity not beholden to parking requirements are restaurants located within Downtown's central core.  How generous our City fathers are.  If our city is densify and become a more pedestrian friendly place it is time that we really start to examine our parking requirements and make some changes to reflect our ideals.

Looking from the top of one parking garage to another in downtown Tampa.  A rare scene.

Now, if someone could devote the time to creating a similar infographic that shows the proportion of surface parking to vertical parking in the city, that would be much appreciated.

1 comment:

  1. In a highly dense city one has to face such problems. But only with combine efforts it can be overcome. Thanks for making such a
    nice attempt.

    ReplyDelete