2013-05-29 – David Levinson, Transportist

A reporter asked: How much parking is there in Minneapolis? This is not a question for which there is a well-sourced answer.

Downtown Parking: There are nearly 25,000 parking spaces in 38 parking lots and ramps throughout downtown,

In the City there are 7000 metered spaces:

Minneapolis Municipal Parking System has 17 parking ramps and 7 lots
These Ramps and Lots encompass over 20,000 parking spaces. (Subtracting this from the first estimate suggests only 5,000 parking spaces are private).

Elements of Access: Transport Planning for Engineers, Transport Engineering for Planners. By David M. Levinson, Wes Marshall, Kay Axhausen.

Outside of downtown requires estimating.

On street-unmetered parking? The City has 1100 miles of street . (I think this excludes state and county roads, I am not sure about park roads, but this is most of them). My guess is 200 spaces per mile (@ ~26 feet per car). If there were no “no parking restrictions” this gives 220,000 on-street spaces (The vast majority of which are unmetered).

Off-street private parking. There are 155,155 households. If each one has 1 off-street space (some have 2 or 3, some have 0), that would be 155,155 off-street spaces in residential areas. I would guess based on national data about twice as many in commercial areas. Roughly every car has to have a space at home, work, and shop.

In short there are lots of parking.

Does anyone have a better estimate?

130109 LU posters 1st

Como Zoo Poster at bus stop

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a city in possession of a good transit system must be in want of some posters. The art of the poster seems to have diminished with the emergence of so many alternative media, ranging from TV to Internet, and markets for commercial art from advertising to the Infographic. Yet we still want to communicate with transit users and encourage them to behave in certain ways (shop during the off-peak, don’t eat on the bus) or consider certain destinations.

While it would be great to have more new posters like the London ones in the upper left, we do not avail ourselves to the opportunities that are already present. I see ads for destinations at bus stops in the Twin Cities which don’t even tell you how to get there via transit. A recent one I saw was this otherwise excellent poster for the Como Zoo . How hard would it be for the Zoo ads (or all ads) to have a tag line at the bottom identifying which bus routes (the number 3) serve the Zoo? Maybe the transit agency could encourage posters for destinations to have brief transit information on the poster (by discounting the ad rate a little bit).

Sure, most customers won’t use it, half of advertising is wasted. Nevertheless, this piece of information lodges in the passerby’s mind that:

It is in fact possible to get to the Como Park Zoo by transit,
The number 3 bus goes near Como, if I need to go near there, I might be able to use a bus, and
It might be possible to get other places by transit.