Last week The Atlantic – Cities published an article discussing what DC would be like if our Metrorail system had never been built. If you haven’t read it yet, it’s worth a look.

The piece of their article that really stands out to me is this graphic, which shows the area of downtown DC that would have to be converted to parking garages in order to store all the extra cars that would come downtown, if not for Metro. That’s parking garages, not surface lots.

Can you imagine this? It’s more than half of downtown! It’s an absolutely huge area. And never mind all the additional roads we’d need to get those cars in and out. If we needed this much parking, it would destroy our city. We wouldn’t have a city. We’d have Tysons Corner, which everyone hates and to which Fairfax County is now adding Metro in a desperate attempt to fix.

But we’re lucky. We avoided this tragedy. Most other American cities didn’t. Most other American cities did this.

And the real shocking thing is there are still misguided souls out there who think our cities would be better if we tore them down.