No, I didn’t spend my day outside measuring parking lots. I spent it inside measuring existing, available data from OpenStreetMap. The last time I measured the amount of parking area in Chicagoland was on September 16, 2018, using the same data source.
Using the footprints of parking lots and garages drawn into OpenStreetMap as a data source, the area of land in a portion of Chicagoland occupied by parking lots and garages is 254,429,609 square feet. This portion represents the “envelope” of the Chicago city limits.
This map shows the tan-colored “clipping boundary” envelope in which the parking lots were measured. The Chicago city limits are shown in pink.
Last year it was 247,539,968 square feet, so the measured area of this portion of Chicagoland’s parking lots and garages increased by a hair over 2.7 percent. This isn’t necessarily new parking areas, but it’s parking areas that have been documented and mapped.
Looking at just the City of Chicago limits, though, the land area of Chicago occupied by already-mapped parking lots and garages is 163,995,621 square feet, or about 2.5 percent of Chicago’s area.
“Fare capping” is a jargon term for a fare policy that any transit agency can implement to save their riders money, make fares fairer, and potentially increase ridership. Another term is “deal”, as these policies net riders a break in the fares.
Fare capping ensures that riders who pay for rides with a transit card* will never pay more than the cost of one or more daily and multi-day passes that the transit agency includes in its fare capping policy.
Example 1: Consider a tourist or infrequent visitor to the city. The tourist will use transit to get around and when they arrive at a ticket vending machine, they’re given the option to get a smart card and load with “e-purse” (cash to pay as they ride) or get a smart card and load it with a pass for one or more days. In Chicago, there are 1-day, 3-day, 7-day, and 30-day options, for $10, $20, $28, and $105.
Just like anyone else, the tourist doesn’t want to pay more than they have to so they try to estimate the number of trips they’ll take today to see if the number of rides will cost more than $10 (the price of a 1-day pass). That sounds like a complicated thought exercise and one with a high likelihood of being wrong at the end of the day!
In a fare capping system, the tourist won’t have to choose! They obtain the transit smart card, load it with $5 cash, and perhaps connect it to an app or connect it to an auto-load functionality. The tourist rides buses and the ‘L’ and as soon as they ride $10 worth in the service day, their transit smart card automatically starts granting them free rides – their transit card has just been granted a 1-day pass!
By eliminating the need to choose between fare products, the tourist is more comfortable riding transit as much as they need to today because they know that they’ll never be charged more than $10.
Example 2: Consider someone who doesn’t earn very much and uses transit to get to work two times a day, five days a week, 20 days a month. At $2.50 per ride, that works out to $100, which is less than the cost of a 30-day pass in Chicago (which is $105, and an oddity, but I won’t address that). This person also sometimes takes additional rides after work and on the weekend to run errands, so their monthly rides will end up costing more than $105, the price of a 30-day pass.
It would make the most financial sense for this worker to get a 30-day pass. But when you don’t earn much, it’s hard to come up with or part with $105 at one time.
In a fare capping system, the person doesn’t have to worry about putting up $105 at this very moment. They would be able to ride transit as much as they want to in a 30-day period knowing that they will pay $2.50 per ride each day, but never more than $105 in a 30-day period. They don’t need to have $105 right now to be able to save money in the long run.
A Miami-Dade Transit Agency poster indicate fare capping (without calling it fare capping, because that’s a wonky phrase).
Cities with fare capping
19 cities, last updated May 13, 2025
London is first in the list because they were first with fare capping – It was pretty cool back in 2014 when my Anglophile friend told me to borrow his Oyster card and just tap away and ride transit all day, because I would never pay more than the cost of a 1-day pass (in May 2023 the cost is £8.10).
London also has weekly capping, but this doesn’t include the Underground or Overground (buses and trams only). The week also starts on Monday and ends on Sunday.
Miami is the most recent place to have fare capping, which @erik_griswold spotted on a poster. Daily capping only.
On Sundays, people can ride on metro, train, bus, ferry and light rail services all day Sunday for the price of one ride, $2.80 AUD (about $1.89 as of August 22, 2019).
Another deal the Opal card offers users: Ride 8 times in a week, and all subsequent rides are 50% off.
Indianapolis’s IndyGo transit agency has daily capping, and weekly capping.
San Jose-based transit agency Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) has daily capping which they call “Day Pass Accumulator”.
Oakland-East Bay’s AC Transit has daily capping, but they don’t use those words. The website says that a day pass is applied to the Clipper transit smart card when a third trip is taken in a day.
Portland, Oregon: TriMet, C-TRAN, and Portland Streetcar seem to have the most flexible payment options for their fare capping policy: Riders with a Hop transit smart card get daily capping and monthly capping. People who pay with Google Pay and Apple Pay can also get daily and weekly capping; people who pay with Samsung Pay or a contactless credit card can get daily capping.
New York City’s MTA implemented a kind of weekly fare capping with the introduction of OMNY contactless payments in 2022: Spend $34 – 12 paid rides – in a 7-day period and subsequent rides in that 7-day period are free.
San Diego Metropolitan Transit System (MTS) has “best fare” daily and monthly fare capping when people use a PRONTO plastic card or the PRONTO app.
Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS) has daily, weekly (Monday to Sunday), and monthlyfare capping for users of the Umo app (which generates a QR code to be scanned by an on-board validator).
The STIB/MIVB transit authority in Brussels has daily fare capping of €7.50 (all trips after the fourth paid trip are free).
Tallinn, Estonia, has daily fare capping. The fare per ride as of May 12, 2025, is €2, good for 1 hour of travel. Riders must use the same fare medium (including contactless international bank card) on each bus and tram they use during that 1 hour (only one fare will be charged). After riding three times at that price in a service day, a day pass worth €5.50 will be charged instead. If paying with a contactless bank card, only the validator in the front works.
Denver, Colorado, has daily and monthly fare capping since 2024. “When you use your MyRide Barcode or MyRide Card, 3-Hour Passes automatically convert to Day and Monthly Passes.”
Similar fare benefit schemes
GO Transit in Toronto – a regional rail and bus network – offers a large discount to people who pay with PRESTO and repeat a trip 36 to 40 times a month, and it’s free for trips 41 and later. I think this is at first a bit confusing, but the chart below may clarify.
Chart showing the discounts for repeated rides on GO Transit.
How transit agencies advertise fare capping
St. Louis’s MyGatewayCard has daily capping.The Lothian company operates bus in and around Edinburgh, Scotland, and launched the TapTapCap in August 2019.
* Notes
A transit card is only necessary for transit systems that store the values and passes on a card. The Chicago Transit Authority and its vendor, Cubic, created Ventra, an account-based system that stores values and passes on an account in the cloud, and is expressed through the Ventra card, compatible smartphones, and compatible smartwatches. Fares to pay for rides Metra, a commuter rail company that participates in Ventra, can be purchased using the Ventra account’s stored value. Metra doesn’t accept taps from a Ventra card.
I probably won’t actually submit my idea to the Chicago Prize, a $10 million grant competition to revitalize neighborhoods, so I’m posting it here for everyone to read.
Basically, I want to use the $10 million as seed money to start a small organization that does design, construction administration, and property management to help homeowners build 1,000 accessory dwelling units in the form of new construction detached rear houses, attached rear houses, and renovated basement and attic units. $10 million won’t build that many, so there will be a small finance team to assemble additional grants as well as collect money through a crowdfunding initiative so anyone with $50 or more (up to $1,000) can invest in the program.
I thought solving this problem took longer than it should have. I thought there would have been an integrated function in PostgreSQL to pick the lowest (smallest or minimum) and highest (largest or maximum) numbers in an ARRAY of numbers.
LEAST and GREATEST didn’t work, since those work on expressions, not arrays.
MIN and MAX don’t work because they are aggregating functions, and I didn’t want that.
Given an array of numbers, pick the lowest and highest ones using two custom functions.
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION small(anyarray, int)
RETURNS anyelement AS $$
SELECT (ARRAY(SELECT unnest($1) ORDER BY 1 asc))[$2]
$$ LANGUAGE sql;
The second argument in this function is to extract the Nth smallest number. In my case I want the smallest number so I set “1” for the second argument.
You can rewrite the query to select the Nth largest number by changing the “ORDER BY 1 asc” to “ORDER BY 1 desc” (reversing the order of the array’s unnesting.)
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION small(anyarray, int)
RETURNS anyelement AS $$
SELECT (ARRAY(SELECT unnest($1) ORDER BY 1 asc))[$2]
At the YIMBYtown conference in Boston, Massachusetts, last week, I heard from a panel comprising a developer, an architect, and a manager of special housing projects at the City of Boston. I forget who described this novel (sort of) multi-family housing configuration, but I noted it because it has benefits similar to Chicago’s coach & rear houses.
Here’s how it works.
There would be a residential building full of condos. Each condo would have a few bedrooms. One of the bedrooms would have its own kitchen or kitchenette, bathroom, and direct entry to the building’s corridor. The bedroom would be “locked off” from the rest of the condo.
The condo owner would rent the bedroom to a tenant, providing them housing that would most likely be less costly than an equivalent (new construction) apartment.
As the condo owner’s household changes – perhaps the family has another child – the tenant can move out and the owner can remove the kitchen to create another bedroom or closet.
Lock offs are heavily also present in time shares.
The zoning question is whether this condo is treated as one unit or two.
If you’re trying to increase affordable housing in your municipality, it’s necessary to classify this condo configuration as a single unit. Anything more and it wouldn’t be possible to build any of these, as the building developer would run into minimum lot area per unit and FAR limitations.
My friend Jacob Peters quickly drew a floor plan for what a lockoff condo would look like.
According to the speaker, the project didn’t get off the ground because the developer couldn’t get lending because of lenders who don’t understand the model. Said the speaker, “We need spaces that can evolve as our lives change. And we don’t have that flexibility in our housing stock.”
Benefits of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) like coach & rear houses
Increase the supply of affordable housing
Increase income for homeowners
Support aging in place – ADUs give families flexibility to share property and living spaces with extended family members
Increase work for small and local architects and contractors
Boost local business support by restoring a neighborhood’s historical density
