Parking garages are wasteful and environmentally damaging. So of course the industry has invented a greenwashing campaign, called the Green Parking Council:
LAS VEGAS – July 1, 2015) — The Green Parking Council (GPC) today announced the first seven parking facilities in the U.S. to achieve Green Garage Certification, a comprehensive sustainability standard for existing and new parking facilities evaluating 48 elements of garage operation, programs, structure, and technology. The Green Garage Certification program will be delivered and promoted globally by the Green Business Certification, Inc., the certification body for the U.S. Green Building Council’s global LEED® green building rating system.
“Cars are getting smarter, people are getting smarter, and parking garages are getting smarter,” explains Paul Wessel, executive director of the GPC, an affiliate of the International Parking Institute. “The greening of parking facilities transforms them into enablers of sustainable mobility. Certified Green Garages offer significant benefits for drivers, tenants, building owners, property managers, and society overall.”
When parking garages are built with green elements, it is often to mitigate stupid planning decisions. That is certainly the case with the 7 “winners”. In a way, we can thank the GPC for finding the country’s most ridiculous parking garages — a list which includes the following:
- Silver Spring Metro Plaza – parking garage built at a Washington Metro “intermodal” station.
- Bank of America Plaza – situated in downtown Los Angeles, near several Metro stops, and dozens of bus lines.
- Westpark Corporate Center – another facility near the Washington Metro, and located in a Tysons neighborhood that certainly doesn’t lack for parking.
Also on the list is the Corrnell University Forest Home Garage. It deserves special recognition for most ironic location of a “green” parking garage. The 3-level facility was built (at considerable expense) under the new Human Ecology building, in a prime lakefront location:
Constructed in 2009, Forest Home is a 254-space garage located under the LEED Platinum-certified Human Ecology Building. Electric vehicle charging stations, building systems commissioning, nearby public green space and a highly efficient LED lighting system contributed to the certification. “Cornell’s pioneering efforts toward greening parking facilities is a tremendous source of pride for us” Bartt Smith, Transportation Services’ project specialist for GGC. “Progress continues toward the certification of the Hoy Field Garage.”
Congratulations to this year’s winners! And looking forward to learning about other sustainable, green parking garage from the GPC in the years to come…
I think you’re making the perfect the enemy of the good. A lot of your criticisms amount to namecalling, which is a shame, because I would’ve liked to have seen a substantive analysis here. Your point about Tyson’s Corner is well taken – it’s hideous – though that area is being gradually infilled and some parking has already been redeveloped. But what’s wrong with park-and-ride situations in places like Silver Springs, where D.C.’s budgetary and planning situation turns the kind of Metro and transit extension that you might prefer into a 30-year production? Would you prefer that the Metro stop go unused by motorists, making it even harder to justify further transit growth once you lose those customers? And what specifically about that structure is worth sneering at?
Plus, your assertion that “green” features in parking (whatever that means) are meant to mitigate stupid planning decisions isn’t an argument against those features, it’s an argument against stupid planning, but as we all know, smarter planning is (and shouldn’t be) a luxury that many places don’t have access to (our nation’s capital first and foremost). If you’re going to build parking spaces – and some will have to be built, from time to time – it makes sense to do it in as efficient and low-impact a manner as possible, replacing the old supply with better supply, and recognizing how that work gets done just doesn’t seem like the end of the world to me.
You don’t really know what was going on at Cornell. The garage was pretty much a like-for-like replacement of a previous parking lot under the previous Human Ecology building. That building had been deemed to be failing structurally. 😛
Now, the administration could have been forward-thinking and tried to do something new, and they didn’t and weren’t; I’m not saying they are making wise decisions.
But basically they copied what was there before while fixing the engineering problems (underground stream runs through the thing, so it’s a horrible location to build a building at all). The parking is all spots jealously claimed by faculty members, so I’m not surprised they didn’t engage in the fight which would have been needed to reduce parking.