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Downtown Spokane, Washington. The red areas represent surface parking lots, while the purple ones indicate parking garages
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this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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Why the highlighting? Is one more terrible than the other? If so, which one?
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
The Texas Doughnut
Also that one from Quora, which looks different.
A Texas donut is an apartment building that wraps around an attached parking structure. I've seen a few different variations but the nicer ones have courtyards between the units and the parking garage that I imagine is more to allow cross breeze than anything else because being inside them would be incredibly claustrophobic. Still a huge waste of space but if you really want your residents to all have cars they kind of make sense because the parking footprint is more or less the same as you would get as if you built a low rise, plus you hide the cars from the street view, which is nice because parking garages are usually pretty ugly. You can also bury the cars instead and that works way better for somewhere like downtown Seattle, since real estate is just so mind bogglingly expensive in downtown areas of major cities, but honestly if you're living in the city it seems like storing the car offsite would make more sense if you really feel like you have to have one that badly because underground parking is also ridiculously expensive compared to above ground parking structures, plus you have to worry about water ingress and degraded pilings and all sorts of nasty shit. That actually happened in Florida and it took the building with it when it went. Then again that's Florida, it might work better when you're not building a high rise on a sponge.
found it: https://apnews.com/article/surfside-tower-collapse-investigation-76a9176edbb581813b2fcc03850bd592
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/
Lmao you think I didn't search, my friend? Maybe I wanted to hear from the person who wrote it, ever think of that?
Multiply that with view count.
And the results are mixed.
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 are is covered in parking.
There is no red vs purple, but colour vs lack there of.
Them machines own the city.
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.