Black Friday Parking: What Is It, and How to Get Involved?
All the way back in 2013, Strong Towns started a yearly tradition of crowd-sourcing photos of retail parking lots on Black Friday. The idea was simple: showcase that even on the busiest shopping day of the year, plenty of parking spaces remain unused, supposedly when demand is at its peak.
The goal? To draw attention to the damaging effects of minimum parking requirements–rules that are often justified by the need to accommodate the demand on the busiest days. This logic leads to absurd outcomes, like a zoning code that requires eight parking spaces for every bowling lane, despite the fact that most bowling businesses only allow a maximum of six people per lane. This is the core paradox of Black Friday Parking: costly parking mandates have forced us to build for a demand spike that doesn’t exist, saddling our cities with a pavement problem 365 days a year.
Starting in 2023, we officially partnered with Strong Towns and joined in the #BlackFridayParking tradition of documenting vacant spots on the big shopping day, and sharing them on social media. Below are example posts from 2024:
“Cities have parking mandates because they want to make sure there’s enough parking for a Taylor Swift concert, or for busy shopping days. Black Friday comes but once a year, and Taylor Swift once a lifetime. But parking mandates make our lives worse all year”
Tony Jordan
Here’s how to participate in #BlackFridayParking
Capture the Evidence: On your shopping trip, take a few minutes to document the scene. Head to a large retailer, shopping plaza, or strip mall. Snap photos or a short video that shows the stark contrast between the busy stores and the empty parking spaces.
Share Your Findings: Post your visuals on your favorite social media platform (Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, etc). Use the hashtag #BlackFridayParking and a simple caption like, “Even on Black Friday, we don’t need this much parking. It’s time to reform our parking policies”
Share what you are doing with friends and family: If you don’t, I promise you they will confront you and inquire as to why you are taking pictures of empty parking lots on your way to Trader Joe’s :p
