See https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/and-results-are-blackfridayparking-and-they-are-worse-you-can-imagine.html, where you can find more pictures from the campaign.
I’m on the email list for Strong Towns, a Smart Growth organization. They have an activity every Black Friday (the frenzied shopping day after Thanksgiving), which is to photograph parking lots that aren’t even full on that day and post the pictures with the hashtag, #blackfridayparking. Local zoning laws often demand that businesses comply with parking minimums, which helps explain why every store on a sprawling thoroughfare is surrounded by a lagoon of parking. Strong Towns has a campaign against mandatory parking minimums and it involves the Black Friday photography project. This is an issue that cuts across the political spectrum, with progressives and libertarians both concerned about these sorts of regulations. As Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn notes, parking lots are among the worst forms of land use. They contribute to sprawl, they generate polluted runoff, they worsen flooding, they require maintenance (including snowplowing in colder places), they’re unfriendly to pedestrians, they’re ugly, they generate few jobs or tax revenues, they’re often hard to navigate by car, they raise local temperatures in summer, and they’re often empty. Perhaps the only benefit of empty parking lots is that they’re good for learning to drive!
See:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/11/19/its-2018-does-your-city-still-have-minimum-parking-requirements?utm_source=pardot&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=generallistjab&utm_content=1119182018-does-your-city-still-have-minimum-parking-requirements
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/7/2/3-major-problems-with-parking-minimums
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/11/20/we-forbid-what-we-value-most
This is what one block of charming Old Town Pocatello, Idaho would look like if it had to follow modern day parking requirements. See more examples here. (source: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/7/2/3-major-problems-with-parking-minimums)
– Peter
It is interesting to think of how parking lots interact with sprawl in a sort of vicious cycle. It is often the presence of the lots themselves that lead to buildings being more spaced out, which necessitates automobiles to travel between them, which in turn call for more parking lots. It seems that there must be some way to optimize parking for multiple buildings at once, but the actual issues are much more complicated.