CLARKSVILLE, TN (CLARKSVILLE NOW) – On Friday, Sept. 19, the Clarksville-Montgomery County Regional Planning Commission (CMCRPC) partnered with the Clarksville Urbanized Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (CUAMPO) to celebrate Park(ing) Day as they transformed two on-street parking spaces in front of their office at 329 Main St. into a parklet.
Park(ing) Day is held annually worldwide on the third Friday of September, and the project urges people across the world to temporarily repurpose curbside parking spaces and convert them into public parks and social spaces to advocate for safer, greener and more equitable streets for communities, according to myparkingday.org.
Zach Madden, with Clarksville Urbanized Area MPO, said that the first Park(ing) Day event was held in San Francisco back in 2005 when a metered-parking space was repurposed as a miniature park.
“Complete with grass, a tree and a bench, people were encouraged to stop and relax for a moment in a green space surrounded by asphalt. This event started a conversation around reimagining on-street and surface parking as community spaces,” Madden told Clarksville Now. “Staying true to the original concept of Park(ing) Day, the parklet outside of the RPC building was designed as a simple green space for people to take a moment and sit in the shade.”
‘Next year we would love to partner with other city and county departments’
Throughout the day on Friday, the public engagement for the event was driven by a game to guess the number of surface and garage parking spaces in the downtown area. “Participants were surprised to learn that downtown’s new parking garages contain 25% of the total parking spaces in the downtown area,” Madden said.
“We hear from residents often that there isn’t enough parking in the downtown area, and that isn’t the case. We created this visual of all the surface parking lots and garages in the downtown area to show just how much parking there actually is. I have to say I was surprised after I finished creating the map to learn that roughly 30% of the total land cover in downtown is paved for parking,” he said.
Before the event was over, RPC and MPO staff were already discussing hosting the second annual Park(ing) Day in 2026.
“Next year we would love to partner with other city and county departments, local businesses, and vendors to build upon this inaugural event,” said Regional Planning Commission Director Jeffrey Tyndall. “Specifically, we would like to explore what outdoor dining and public spaces could look like on Franklin Street and Strawberry Alley.”
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