Greening the Concrete JungleDeveloped and Presented by:

Greg Schundler and Graywolf Nattinger

Houston, Modern Day

Rotterdam, World War II

Hartford, CT: An Example of Parking and Urban Decay

• Parking is the single largest land use in American cities (30-40% of total land cover)• Unused and excess impervious asphalt surfaces are ecological liabilities and urban

revitalization opportunity costs

Goals

1) Identify parking areas that are underutilized, redundant, near ecologically sensitive areas and/or near public transit routes.

2) Consolidate lots by creating or encouraging use of parking garages in high use areas

3) Develop green parking infrastructure where feasible

4) Convert pavement into park expansion, new parks, open space, and biodiversity corridors.

Source Data• WA State Landuse: Washington Dept. of Ecology,

http://www.ecy.wa.gov/services/gis/data/data.htm

• Pierce County Hydrology: Pierce County GIS Data

https://wagda.lib.washington.edu/data/geography/wa_counties/pierce/index.html

• King County Hydrology: King County GIS Data Portal

http://www5.kingcounty.gov/gisdataportal/Default.aspx

• WRIA10 outline: ROSS project dataset from gisws.sdedatabase.

• Biodiversity Corridors: ROSS project dataset from gisws.sdedatabase.

“Ecosystem” feature dataset.

• Express Transit routes and Light Rail platforms: Sound Transit - GIS Data

https://wagda.lib.washington.edu/data/geography/wa_counties/SoundTransit/index.html

• Parking Occupancy table: Puget Sound Regional Council

• Brownfields Addresses: Dept. of Ecology Cleanup Site Search https://fortress.wa.gov/ecy/gsp/SiteSearchPage.aspx

Parking in Tacoma Data Statistics

• Data for parking lots from off-street parking inventory of Central Business District (CBD)

• Mean Average Occupancy = 50.4%

• 169 areas representing 359 lots and 20,494 stalls

• Only 9% of lots have optimal Average Occupancy or above (>85%)

• Total LandUse Parking Area = 1,062,804 sq ft

• Total LandUse “Green Space” = 3,514,930 sq ft

A Geospatial Problem

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- 500 1,000 1,500 2,000Stall Numbers

Scatter Plot of Parkings Lots by Stall Number and Average Occupancy

Work Flow Diagram

Geodatabase Schema

Compiling and Sharing Data

• SDE: We used our original SDE datasets to collect shapefiles from the gisws.sde geodatabase that we thought may be relevant to our project. We used it as an idea sharing platform (read only).

• Our operational platform was a file geodatabase stored in Dropbox.

• Most processes and experimentation performed in file geodatabasessaved to our personal workstations.

Challenges

• Image sharing

• Data manipulation updates (lacking full SDE capabilities)

• Comparing spatial data of objects within a single feature class

• Difficulty organizing topologies and networks

• Inconsistent/incongruent data: 1) Census blocks were larger than landuse parking lots

2) Many census blocks with parking data did not have Landuse “Parking Lots” designation and vice versa

3) Some Parking Lots had different land use designations (e.g. Tacoma Dome Parking Lot)

Tutorial-Joining Census Block Data to ArcMap

• OBJECTID: combination of several columns (use Excel Formula: =A1&B1&C1)

• ArcMap is fussy with what data it will read from Excel: Excel will store many digit numbers as Scientific Notation, which does not carry over to ArcMap; change format to “General”

Decision Model

“YES”

“NO”

Map 1

• Open Stalls is product of “occupancy” x “number of stalls”

• Priority Criteria for adjacency:• green space

• biodiversity corridors

• public transit

• streams

• fish bearing streams

Map 2

Map 3 Map 4

Consolidation Opportunities/Parking Garage

• 13 is Parking Garage (lower right)

• Many underutilized parking lots and lack of Green Spaces

• Points of Interest: Rialto Theatre (7), Pantages Theatre (6), Frost Park, Tacoma Municipal Building (26), Pierce County Building (20)

Consolidation Opportunities/Parking Garage

• 14 is Parking Garage (upper right)

• Many underutilized parking lots and lack of Green Spaces

• Transit Stops, Condominums(7), Bates Technical College (1), YMCA (11)

Green Space Augmentation

• Large Green Space

• Connectivity Opportunities

• Points of Interest: Churches, Thriftway, Stadium

New Green Space/Remove Pavement

• Parking Garage (lower left)

• Public Transit stops

• Development Opportunity advertise by city (11)

• Lack of Green Space

Green Space Augmentation/New Park

• Undeveloped lots with soil coverage present potentially cheaper opportunity

• Crane signifies development

• Residential areas( lower left)

Change Model/Improvement Programming

Change Model/Improvement Programming

Project Implementation

Project Implementation

Impact Model

ConclusionsData of municipal storm water drainage systems would be helpful for determining placement of rain-gardens.

Detailed analysis of “WA land_use” would provide a more comprehensive plan meeting our project objectives, based on our criteria.

Explore Political/Economic Landscape

Funding Mechanisms: • “Adopt a Park” allow businesses, churches, and

organizations to contribute toward urban revitalization

• Brownfields Integrated Planning Grants