Photo by Rich Anderson on Flickr.

Reader mfs

alexandrian discovered this Washington Post article from 1983, revealing the parking deck over I-66 to be a $5 million boondoggle that was never much used:

The State of Virginia spent $5 million to erect a three-story, 352-car garage over I-66 in Arlington that sometimes is filled with more teen-age lovers from a nearby high school and abandoned refrigerators than cars. “It’s way underutilized,” said Dennis Johnson, chief of Arlington’s public works operations division. He said he has counted anywere from none to five to 45 cars parked during the day in the cream-colored garage.

Copyright prevents me from posting the entire article, but it explains how the county decided not to advertise the free garage to avoid competing with nearby taxpaying pay garages. VDOT built the garage to replace lost parking spaces from the construction of I-66, but almost as many discarded appliances seemed to find their way into the garage as motorists. The state built this garage before another deck over I-66, the park at the intersection with the Key Bridge.

The article also quotes officials about the feasibility of charging, writing that “they scrapped the plan after the county attorney’s office said the garage could not make a profit.” If this is the county attorney, does that mean it’s not allowed to make a profit, rather than that it wouldn’t attract enough parkers? Interesting if so. They may not have had tools like parking districts to handle pay garages properly in those days, but unless refrigerators went at a higher rate, charging for that garage might not have even made enough to pay for staff to collect payments.

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.