For transportation geeks: parking, parking lots, parking pricing, price of parking…here’s a selection of what I’ve been perusing:

The aesthetics of parking lots: Taking parking lots seriously as public spaces.  Michael Kimmelman, art and architecture critic, argues we should treat parking lots more like architecture than mere infrastructure.

new technology, new money and parking: the National League of Cities with its corporate partners IBM and Citi announced a $25 million credit facility for parking innovation.  Reading further on IBM’s Smarter Planet site reveals they aim to improve “drivers’ experience, not just where and when they drive. And it could lead to advances in the cars we drive, the roads we drive them on, and the public transit we might take instead.”  I remain skeptical that their modeling, traffic flow analysis, and the like are going to be sufficient to manage traffic for their projection that the 1 billion cars on the road today will double by 2020.

Atlantic Cities’ It’s the parking, stupid describes Nelson Nygaard transportation consultant Jeffrey Tumlin’s anti-free parking mission which he describes as operating “like a methadone clinic to get cities off their parking addictions,” he says. “And each addict goes through a different route.”

More about the problems with free parking, minimum parking requirements, and other “traditional” practices can be found in Parking Policy Reform More Important Than LEED Certification by Todd Litman (the guy behind the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute – check out the page on parking and land use).

And some questions about parking over at Finding a place for parking at the Project for Public Spaces  designed to get planners to think less about parking spaces and more about bringing people to places, as well as practical questions about how to maximize existing parking.

And some blogs devoted to parking: Reinventing Parking and Parking World.