The Streetsblog California Park(ing) Day Post

Today is Park(ing) Day, the now-ten-year-old celebration that repurposes street parking spots for people rather than cars.

The concept is simple. People "take over" a parking space and use it for something other than car parking for a day, or a couple of hours, or until the meter runs out. As you would expect, Streetsblog generally finds Park(ing) Day pretty exciting and has led bike tours, produced maps, programmed our own spaces, and of course covered the heck out of the annual event.

This year, we're asking for your help to cover Park(ing) Day throughout California.

The goal of Park(ing) Day is to show how much public space is wasted for below-market-rate storage of people's personal property. Once people experience what can be done in even a small amount of space, they usually want changes in cities' public parking policies.

Park(ing) Day is something of a success. Today, the concept of a "parklet" has taken hold in many cities, and what were temporary have in many spots become permanent people parking spots.

ReBar, the group that started the idea in 2006, no longer exists, and participation on the official Park(ing) Day website is spotty, so there's no one central place you can go any more to see where parking spots are being turned into temporary parks in your city, or others. But other groups have taken over and run with the concept, from local advocacy groups like WOBO in Oakland to the American Society of Landscape Architects, which is designing and putting up parklets throughout the country today.

So there are still plenty of great Park(ing) Day parklets popping up around the state. Send your media from Park(ing) Day throughout California to damien@streetsblog.org or melanie@streetsblog.org and we'll include it in this post. If we get enough media, we may even make our own video. More California Park(ing) Day Media, after the jump.