cambridge parking lots, again

Hey you wizards at the googleplex with your $200 billion market cap and all of the technical brain power and tweaking time that buys ... why is it that my first post to this blog, using two of your core products and a simple cut and paste - why is it that this humble little effort fails? Why can I not paste a nice, simple google map into my blog without the blogger editor choking on it? Why do I have to start a new entry because my original is dead to me now as an editable document?

Help? Tips? Suggestions?

.... crickets ...

Anyway, the point I was trying to make before I got hamstrung was not that there is necessarily too MUCH parking in Central Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. It's that the placement and distribution are needlessly diffuse. If you (can actually, without technical hiccups) look at the map inserted in the previous entry, you'll see that the east side of Mass Ave (essentially the whole Bishop Allen corridor) is a sloppy rash of parking on the Central Square landscape.

Back in the 1960s maybe this was appealing, back when folks thought mass transit was just some doomed artifact and the automobile was civilization's great, gleaming hope. In those deluded days you wouldn't get much argument when planners told you the commercial prospects of any urban downtown were hopeless if 80% of available land wasn't allocated for parking spaces. But that blockhead logic is pretty far behind us now, isn't it?

I know, I know - there's a large and vocal contingent out there twitching and squirming at the idea of vertical development in our lovely Republic of Cambridge, but wouldn't you prefer to see living and commerce and maybe even entertainment built a few stories up, perhaps with a bit of green space around it, instead of this bleak desert of asphalt?