N. Neil Parking Study
N. Neil Street is a major commercial corridor in the northern part of the City of Champaign. With major interstate access to I-57 and I-74, this corridor has exploded with suburban-style commercial growth, with large strip-malls and big box stores sprouting up within the past four decades. As a result, this area has become a pavement paradise, with tens of thousands of parking spaces built to accommodate the new commercial tenants. With just about every major national retailer and grocer operating in this area, it attracts just about everyone who lives in the Champaign-Urbana area, from college students to professors, from farmers to factory workers, despite being on the outer edges of the region. Yet, it seems as if there is a chronic oversupply of parking, with many establishments having well over the required amount that the City requires in its zoning code. This task aimed to analyze this, and vizualize how much excess parking there actually is in this area of Champaign.
Parking mandates—government requirements that developers provide a minimum number of parking spaces—are a key contributor to inefficient, car-dependent cities. These rules distort urban development by forcing businesses and housing to allocate excessive space for cars, driving up costs (passed on to residents through higher rents and prices) while making neighborhoods less walkable and less economically productive.
Parking mandates perpetuate sprawl, increase traffic, and weaken municipal finances—since low-density, car-centric development generates far less tax revenue per acre than walkable urbanism. As a Strong Towns member, I advocate for eliminating these mandates, allowing the market to determine parking supply, and prioritizing people over parking lots to create more resilient, financially solvent, and livable communities.
As evident through these figures, overall, the North Neil/North Prospect Area is overparked. While it is estimated that over 20,550 parking spots exist in the area, Champaign's zoning code (based of parking minimums) only require 15,939 spots. Not only does this mean that this area is 22% overparked, but the roughly 1,800,000 million square feet in excess parking could be used by actual commercial, residential, or mixed land uses that generate additional tax revenue.