Photo: Royston Rascals/Flickr

A quick Flickr search for “Park(ing) Day 2011″ this afternoon turned up this excellent rug-based parking spot reclamation all the way down under in Adelaide, Australia. So far, nothing from NYC, arguably the birthplace of the Park(ing) Day concept (though the San Francisco partisans will have something to say about that).

C’mon, New York, show us how you’re reclaiming the curb. Upload your Park(ing) Day pics to Flickr and tag them “Streetsblog” — or just email them to tips@streetsblog.org. Here’s the handy map showing all 34 Park(ing) locations around the city. We’ll post the best photos we receive later today.

The Park(ing) Day web site has what you need.

Bicycles seem to figure more prominently in Nissan's Leaf promotion than Leafs (or Leaves, as the case may be).

That's what Nissan has done with its New York City promotion for the Leaf, an electric car slated for mass production later this year. Nissan marketing teams hit the streets earlier this week with a faux Park(ing) Day concept. Instead of filling curbside space with sod and benches, they put out some bucket seats and signs pointing to journey-to-zero.com, a flash site that I found too irritating to navigate.

As far as I can tell, this attempt to sell cars by co-opting one of the signature awareness-building strategies of the livable streets movement does not display any actual cars, or even show the image of a Nissan Leaf. It's a car-free PR campaign for cars.

(Obligatory disclaimers: Replacing internal combustion with electric batteries is great. But the zero emissions hype is way overblown, the city-destroying space-hogging problem doesn't disappear with the fossil-fuel powered engines, and electric cars can be driven just as recklessly as conventional cars.)

Apparently, the promoters got a few people to sit in these things when they rolled them out on Wednesday. But really, they need to absorb a few lessons from the Park(ing) Day masters. The sitting arrangement inside a car is inherently anti-social. Staring at a headrest and the back of someone's scalp just doesn't translate to an urban public space.

Maybe that's why the people organizing this campaign also felt compelled to hire some folks to hand out flowers. You need a little public space programming to give people a reason to stop and memorize the journey-to-zero URL.

If you want to see one of these set-ups for yourself, the Nissan promoters will be putting out their bucket seats again all day tomorrow. They have 20 spots reserved. I don't have the exact locations but I'm told there will be four each at Union Square, the Bowery, SoHo, and Tribeca. No word yet on how much the city got paid for all this highly desirable curbside real estate.

So I think it's time to coin a phrase. What's the livable streets equivalent of greenwashing?

As Streetsblog staff and Flickr pool contributors were filing photos on Friday, the Streetfilms crew -- Clarence Eckerson, Jr., Mark Read and Robin Urban Smith -- fanned out across the boroughs to catch the Park(ing) Day action on video. Says Clarence:

This year my travels took me to four of the five boros: biked 43 miles, filmed 22 spots, spent 11 hours outdoors and had one bike crash - while I was walking my bike through Times Square. Go figure!

While there was much fun to be had, Park(ing) Day again demonstrated the value of streets as public spaces. And some spots, as shown in the video, were designed with specific community goals in mind. The "Green for Breathing Park" in the South Bronx was dedicated to the campaign to demolish the Sheridan Expressway, and the "Safer Skillman Corner" in Woodside, Queens demonstrated how the removal of a parking space could make a dangerous street safer.

The folks at HR&A Advisors set up an outdoor office in their Columbus Circle Park(ing) spot, complete with wi-fi and business attire.

It may not have had sod, but this spot on Broadway and 74th Street got a lot of attention from curious passersby. Maybe in part because of the great snacks. (Thanks again for the granola!)

Here's a solar panel-powered laptop on W. 88th, near Broadway. This was probably the quietest spot I visited all day. Tucked away on a neighborhood street, it was ideal for afternoon reading.

That will (probably) do it for us today. We're sure to have more Park(ing) Day coverage next week, so please keep those pics coming to tips@streetsblog.org, or uploaded to Flickr with a "streetsblog" tag.

Photos: Brad Aaron

These pics, courtesy of Sustainable Flatbush, come from the Park(ing) spot on Brooklyn's Cortelyou Road, where fingerpaint and crayons are all the rage.

Photos: Sustainable Flatbush/Flickr

Streetsblog's Brad Aaron has been roving around Manhattan today, snapping shots of Park(ing) installations. Based on these pics, people are really getting into their seating amenities this year. Check out the roll-able chaise longue lawn chairs at the "Plaza Too Kick Off Ur Shoes" on Hudson Street (Plaza Too is a boutique that sells shoes and handbags).

Folding chairs with leg rests and cupholders at the Time's Up! spot on Charles Street and 7th Avenue.

What's inside these boxes at The Open Planning Project's spot on 8th Avenue and 15th Street? I have no idea, but the stack-your-own-seating strategy is intriguing.

Photos from Brooklyn are on the way. Queens and the Bronx, send those pics to tips@streetsblog.org, or upload to Flickr with a "streetsblog" tag.

Photos: Brad Aaron

This pic came in to the Streetsblog Flickr pool a few minutes ago from the Park(ing) spot on Eighth Avenue and 23rd Street.

Keep those photos coming!

Photo: 0r/Flickr

This morning, street reclaimers across the country are settling into their Park(ing) spaces -- more than 450 spots in 80 cities, according to the latest count. For our readers outside New York City, check out the Trust for Public Land's Google map to find a spot near you. TPL also has a great round-up of Park(ing) Day media coverage and the beginnings of a Flickr pool.

New Yorkers: Here's the link again to the map of Park(ing) locations, and don't forget to tag your photos "streetsblog" when you upload them to Flickr.

Happy Park(ing)!

Tomorrow New Yorkers will lay claim to the city's most undervalued real estate, unfurling sod and setting up seating, trees and public art for Park(ing) Day 2008. From Transportation Alternatives, here is a sampling of planned spots:

• Columbus Circle: Curbside break room with grass, communal work tables, internet access
  
• 8th Avenue at 15th Street: Tea garden with DIY seating and sculptures, origami folding
  
• Cortelyou and Argyle Road, Brooklyn: Kid-friendly lounge in front of Cortelyou Library
  

This year's event will feature more than 50 space reclamations. Streetsblog will be out and about tomorrow in Brooklyn and Manhattan. What are your Park(ing) Day plans? 

TreeHugger directs our attention to this installation by Dutch artist Kevin Van Braak. Called "Caravan," it was made by carving up a camper trailer and outfitting it with the trappings of a mini-park. The whole thing can fold back up and be towed around. If you can haul it by bike, Caravan looks like it would fit right in to a Park(ing) spot September 19 (okay, maybe not an exact fit, but the hinges should solve that).

By the way, the deadline to submit an idea for a Park(ing) Day 2008 space is this Friday. Have you applied yet? In Brooklyn, it looks like Ikea is all set to go with their Park(ing) Day installation...

 Photo: Kevin Van Braak

Evicted from their Park(ing) Day spot by the 78th Precinct last month, Park Slope Neighbors (with the PD's permission) observed the event over the weekend. StreetFilms' new producer Elizabeth Press was there, talking to participants, passers-by and motorists who support human-oriented use of valuable public space.

There will be a Park(ing) Day celebration tonight in lower Manhattan, hosted by The Open Planning Project and Transportation Alternatives. Don't forget to RSVP.

I was pretty sure that New York City had San Francisco beat for this year's Park(ing) Day, what, with the children's reading hour and the on-street gymnasium in Brooklyn; Staten Island and Queens getting in on the act; and German tourists frolicking on the sod in front of the MoMA (all captured by StreetFilms, of course). Then I saw photos of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome admiring Rebar Group's Parkcycle -- literally, a pedal-powered park on wheels -- and I realized that we had been foiled again. Back to the drawing board New York City Park(ing) fans. We've got 12 months to come up with something better than this...

Writing for the Christian Science Monitor, Mark Clayton takes stock of the nation's paved parking lots and asks "does America's four-wheeled fleet really need all that extra elbow room?" This article comes on the heels of International Park(ing) Day, a one-day grassroots event in which urban dwellers all around the world transform metered, on-street parking spaces into pocket parks and public plazas as if to suggest that, in a crowded city, there might be better uses for publicly-owned land than storing privately-owned motor vehicles:

Nothing can match America's love affair with the automobile, but a close second might be the parking space. They're everywhere, wrapped around shopping malls, churches, truck stops -- expanses of yellow- and white-striped asphalt as much a part of the American landscape as amber waves of grain or lighted billboards. Now, however, some researchers worry that the United States may have too many parking spaces.

They say it's not worth the sprawl, polluted runoff, and heat generated by these vast lots of concrete and asphalt just to create more automotive resting stations by the Home Depot entrance or the Wal-Mart shopping-cart corral. Anyone who has circled and recircled an airport garage searching for an open spot might beg to differ. But a key problem is that no one really knows how much blacktop real estate is out there.

Enter Bryan Pijanowski, a land-use scientist at Purdue University, who is busy counting the nation's parking spaces. He hasn't gotten very far yet. Using sophisticated software, he and fellow researcher Amalie Davis count 355,000 off-street, nonresidential parking spaces in his home county of Tippecanoe in Indiana. Even that is an estimate based on aerial photos. Now, Dr. Pijanowski wants to expand his survey nationwide.

"This work is unique and important, quantifying something that's not been quantified before," says Donald Shoup, professor of urban planning at the University of California at Los Angeles, himself a parking guru widely recognized as one of the nation's top researchers in the field.

If Pijanowski can finish his count, then researchers will finally determine whether the United States is suffering a parking surplus.

For Dr. Shoup, the issue is cost. Free parking, he says, doesn't turn out to be so free. "We all pay for it, not in our role as drivers, but as residents, taxpayers, and customers," says Shoup, who documents the phenomenon in his book "The High Cost of Free Parking." Big parking lots hike building costs and get passed through to the consumer, sometimes through higher rents in their apartment buildings or bigger costs at their grocery stores. "Every place we drive and park free, we really pay for that parking as something other than as a driver," he says.

Photo: denizen8/Flickr

Clarence Eckerson may have set an all-time speed record for the production of this inspiring StreetFilm on Park(ing) Day 2007. It's a good one.

Seeing pre-schoolers participating in an outdoor music class -- in a parking space -- on Brooklyn's busy Cortelyou Rd., you definitely get the feeling that Park(ing) Day has, in just a few short years, transformed from a quirky art activist event into the beginnings of a broad-based grassroots movement with meaningful social and political implications. On Friday, Park(ing) events were set up in about 150 spots across 42 U.S. cities along with events in five or six other countries, according to the Trust for Public Land.

In PlaNYC 2030, the Bloomberg Administration said that it wants to build a park within 10 minutes walking distance of every neighborhood in the city. On Friday, a bunch of New Yorkers went out and began implementing that plan, simply by turning on-street parking spaces into pocket parks and public plazas.

Eckerson writes:

National PARK(ing) Day was a huge hit here in NYC where Transportation Alternatives & The Trust for Public Land organized a of group of motley advocates in liberating parking spaces to open green areas for city residents to enjoy. Last year, NYC had just one spot, but this year nearly two dozen were sponsored across the city - ranging from a mini-gym on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn to a tribal village (complete with tee pee!) on Manhattan's West Side.

Most amazing was the overwhelmingly positive response the event received. Residents, tourists, commuters, and drivers (yes drivers!) were seen voicing approval. Peds relished the chance to take a seat or diddle their feet in fresh sod. Some ate pizza.

Project for Public Spaces and Open Planning Project set up at Third Ave. and St. Marks.


NYU students planted a garden in this parking space at E. 9th and Stuyvesant.

Open Planning Project's Nick Grossman chats with author Tony Hiss as Livable Streets luminaries Ethan Kent, Paul White, Gary Toth and Phil Myrick enjoy the shade.

Enjoying lunch at 7th Ave. and 24th St.

On-street Park(ing): The best deal in Manhattan.

The first round of Park(ing) Day photos are coming in. Here is a public space reclamation project currently underway on Myrtle Avenue in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Blaise Backer, executive director of the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership explains:

A Pratt Institute Industrial Design class is holding class in the space from 9:30 to 12:30, getting feedback from passersby on public space improvements and new street furniture ideas for Myrtle Avenue. The Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership BID has hired the Pratt Industrial Design incubator to begin studying new design ideas for bike racks, benches, planters and other pieces of street furniture. "Adami Park" is named after Albert and Louie Adami, the former owners of Adami Hardware, which closed last year after many years.

Tonight, you are invited to a planning meeting to prepare for the previously discussed parking spot squat in New York City as a part of Park(ing) Day 2007. If you want to get involved, this is the place to be. Let’s show those San Franciscans who’s boss. 

When

August 2, 2007   6:30 pm   

Where

234 Garfield Place (bet. Seventh & Eighth Aves.), Park Slope, Brooklyn

RSVP

E-mail Lindsey Lusher at lindsey @ transalt . org

Depressed about the direction Mayor Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan is heading? Cheer yourself up by starting to plan for Park(ing) Day 2007. Friday, September 21 is the day when urban dwellers the world over pop quarters into parking meters and take over on-street spaces, temporarily transforming them into miniature parks, playgrounds, cafés and community spaces.

San Francisco is throwing down the gauntlet this year with the construction of the human-powered Parkcycle, above.

Streetsblog is looking for some New York City Park(ers) to step up and meet the challenge by building a parking space-sized studio apartment on wheels complete with Viking range, plasma television and plumbing. Take advantage of the cheapest rent in town -- on-street parking space.

Happy Memorial Day weekend from Streetsblog. If you're driving out of town, consider paying down your carbon debt with a solar-powered barbecue -- just make sure to wear sunscreen while you're using it. See you Tuesday