Rochesterians love their parking. And they love to talk about it. I can’t tell you how many neighborhood meetings I have attended where parking was the issue so many people clung to when opposing any development, even when the developer planned an underground parking garage. “More people will be taking up parking on my street.” Not “More people will be in my neighborhood helping the local businesses flourish.”

This week, parking in Rochester was in the news for two reasons — for winning a highly coveted (not really) Parking Madness Award and for planned new street parking on Main St.

In Jeff Speck’s “Walkable City” he explains that parking takes up more urban land than any other thing in our country. And cities by in large don’t get anything in return. Our cities have lost a great deal of beautiful old buildings as they were replaced by parking lots. In our plight to make it more convenient for cars, we’ve lost what made our downtowns downtowns. Just drive through Buffalo, which lost half of its downtown to parking lots. Or drive around Rochester. Mike from Rochester Subway put together one of my all-time favorite resources on Rochester parking a couple years ago — an aerial map of off-street parking lots (featured above). Private residential lots or parking that does not face the street are not featured. Just all the paved open parking lots, parking garages and unpaved areas used for parking. And there are an over-abundance of them; and in places that make no sense and serve only to disconnect our neighborhoods. To introduce the map, Mike asks, Does Rochester Have a Parking Problem? Indeed, we do.

This week Rochester “won” the Streets Blog USA Golden Crater Parking Award. Our fair city won the Parking Madness Award for 2014, beating out cities like Jacksonville, Kansas City, Detroit, and Tulsa (last year’s winner). Our collective parking craterness triumphantly brought us to the top of the list for something no one should want to be recognized. “Whoo hoo! Come visit us! We have lots of parking lots!”

Truth be told, it was an online voting contest and we were all asked to vote for Rochester to bring some awareness to our need to rethink the way our city is designed (less people-oriented and more car-centric). And it worked! It’s the same reason Mike created his map back in 2012, although it is (as he says and I agree with him) extremely embarrassing to see. Why would we want to bring light to such a badge of honor? Because we all love Rochester and want to help it change for the better.

We have A LOT of parking in Rochester and now we have an award to prove it. So this brings me to the second parking in Rochester issue in the news this week — Senator Schumer was here to talk about the Main Street revitalization effort and his support for a $1.6M federal grant the City of Rochester applied for to create parking spaces on East Main Street.

What?! Didn’t we just win an award for having too much parking?!” Yes. Yes, we did. But remember that thing I said earlier about the placement of many of those parking lots making no sense and serving to disconnect communities? The right kind of parking can actually serve cities and make them better for all people, no matter how they traverse the city.

The city wants to take the bus lanes and turn them into up to as many as 50 parking spaces, as part of the effort to revitalize Main Street into something more walkable and friendly to commercial and residential ventures. On-street parking is part of the city puzzle (in addition to good mass transit, walkability, mixed-use, density, etc.) On-street parking actually helps people drive more slowly, thus making it safer, for example. If you look at Walkable.org’s 12 step checklist for making communities more walkable, you will see that on-street parking (versus big open parking lots) is a common thread.

People drive in Rochester. We know this. But people also walk, bike, skate and take mass transit. We need to have a city that takes into account the many ways we get around it. And as one local business owner told me, “It is time for us to have our Main Street back!”

[Rochester Parking Lot Map courtesy of Rochester Subway.]