“Elite Eight” Parking Madness: Louisville vs. Houston

NCAA basketball has nothing on the drama, the intrigue, the heartbreak of a competitive parking crater tournament. We’re now into the “Elite Eight” round of Parking Madness, and today’s winner will join Dallas in the Final Four. It’s going to be a fierce competition between Louisville and Houston.

Louisville’s downtown, you’ll recall, looks like this:

This entry was submitted by Patrick Smith (@cityresearch on Twitter). Note that the grey boxes are buildings that haven’t been uploaded yet to Google Earth. Local urbanists conservatively estimate that at least one-third of downtown Louisville’s land area is occupied by parking.

Now southward to this anonymously-submitted Houston parking crater:

From what we can tell, spaces like this are the norm in Houston. Another submission from Houston was equally bad, but this one had a poetic twist: These particular parking lots surrounds an Exxon Mobil office building a building that houses Exxon Mobil employees. If that isn’t poetic enough, there’s also light rail running on Main Street, right down the middle of this parking crater.

So there you have it. Choose well. You have until 3 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday to decide the winner.

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