Put It On A Map! Quantifying parking lot waste through GIS analysis

​The Parking Reform Network was an early pioneer in GIS-enabled urbanist activism through their Parking Lot Map. We at the Center for Land Economics were inspired by this, and have built out the next generation of this technology, on our own site Civic Mapper, built on open source tech that we're sharing back with the community. We took freely available bulk satellite imagery to auto-detect parking lot surfaces, and combined that with publicly available sources for assessor data to price the parking lots. Together, that lets us discover hundreds of millions of dollars of wasted land right in the heart of America's downtowns. When we show these maps to elected officials and assessors alike, their jaws drop and they immediately get the message. We'll demonstrate our tools, explain how use them when reaching out to your civic leaders, and for any nerds in the audience, the technical details that underpin them in case you want to build on and improve our methods.