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
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.
I wish we could just give Spokane to Idaho, they’d be a better fit over there. Honestly, I’d go as far to say everything East from Ritzville should probably just considered “Western Idaho.”
I guess my point is that this kind of car-centric build-out and culture seems par for the course for more rural, conservative areas.
Omfg i love ritzville so much. Whenever we drive from OR to MT we always stop in ritzville and spend the afternoon singing “putting on the ritzville”.
Goin back to Ritzville
Don’t ask why
It’s a good a place as any to go and die
No, you take north Idaho. Us in Boise don’t want your stinking Spokane.
Maybe Montana can have both.
hi, fuck you, there are normal people out here trying to fix this shithole. western washington is not the only place that exists and fuck you for trying to burn your neighbors. none of us want to be included with those inbred psychopaths in the panhandle.
also spokane is the second biggest metropolitan area in washington state you goon, this isn’t rural.
Always makes me sad when people start trashing rural areas and even sizeable cities like Spokane. It’s like Americans are completely incapable of nuance, of understanding that at least 1/3 of the people they’re trashing share their politics.
You could be trying a little harder. We need the farmland and you need the port and tax revenue so it would be really nice if we could trust you actually are normal people but you aren’t making it easy.
hi, fuck you too, buddy, from a fellow eastern washington resident who fucking hates it here and doesn’t see much that can be done to fix it.
As another E-WA resident, I don’t want to give up. Things will change. Probably going to take a while, but I want to believe in a change. Besides, I’d rather get turned into the Canadian acquisition of the west coast than become part of Super Idaho.
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.
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.
Where’s the second comparison picture that shows what it would look like with more 3 or 4 story or underground parking.
Gosh the drugs and homeless people though!
Can we exclusively only see urban issues through that lens please?
I have friends that live over that way, when they were first trying to tell me where it was they lived they mentioned Spokane. I’s like “Why would I know this random US city?” (As i’m an aushole), they said, “oh, because it appeared on the show Cops quite a lot, so has become quite well known.” … I couldn’t stop laughing… even now…
wow, there’s so little city in this city… where are the people supposed to be?
The people are all expected to live at least 30 minutes away in the suburbs. This is what’s commonly referred to as “The American dream”.
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)
Lmaooo I love this kind of thing. How utterly you have fucked our cities
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-/
Why the highlighting? Is one more terrible than the other? If so, which one?
The point is to illustrate how much of our cities car-centric infrastructure has destroyed.
If that’s the case no red vs purple is needed. People need to learn how to visualise data to make a point
Works perfectly well to illustrate how much of the city area* is covered in parking.
There is no red vs purple, but colour vs lack there of.The differentiation into two categories with two colors add additional information and make it even more interesting without diminishing the actual point of the visualization.
Surface lots are far worse than parking structures. You can put retail at street level with parking structures. You can do a Texas donut, which is still not ideal but is way denser and prettier than surface lots. Surface parking is cheap. That’s the only advantage it has. And when you factor in the opportunity cost of building nothing but parking on prime real estate it’s not actually all that cheap.
What is a Texas donut
They asked, on the internet, when using a search engine is the same amount of work with no waiting.
https://ericvery.wordpress.com/2013/06/16/the-texas-doughnut/
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…
Like do people realize this? Anyone in their gov??
Take heart that cities are capable of change, if they want to. So long as state government doesn’t get in the way.
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
