Black Friday exposes the folly of parking minimums

Strong Towns is once again using Black Friday to call attention to parking minimums, zoning laws that require a ridiculous amount of land to be set aside for off-street parking.

#BlackFridayParking is a nationwide event drawing attention to the harmful nature of minimum parking requirements.

Parking minimums create a barrier for new local businesses and fill up our cities with empty parking spaces that don't add value to our places.

Each year on Black Friday, one of the biggest shopping days of the year, people all across North America will snap photos of the (hardly full) parking lots in their communities to demonstrate how unnecessary these massive lots are. Participants upload those photos to social media with the hashtag #blackfridayparking.

You can follow the #BlackFridayParking hashtag on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to see examples of empty parking spaces on the busiest retail shopping day of the year.

RELATED: Back in 2013, Tulsa won a national competition for worst "parking crater" -- the expanse of uninterrupted asphalt in the southern part of downtown. A brief effort to pass an ordinance that would require a review process prior to demolition of buildings in the IDL was killed by developers. I have updated a blog entry about that 2013 anti-demolition effort with details of the TMAPC and City Council meetings and links to agendas, comments, minutes, and meeting video.