Rental units do not have enough parking space for the tenants. The tenants then park their vehicles on lawns, which results in compacted soil and run off at lower intensity storms.

1988 air photo of a house in Burlington. Note the nice green backyard.

1999 air photo of the same house. Notice that the backyard is now a parking lot.

Over the past few years several students have been studying the change in hydrology as a result of greenspace changed to "informal" parking. To expand the data base and the spatial mapping coverage, Paul Bierman and I developed the final project for Spring 2001 Geohydology class to further investigate the change in land use. For the students project, teams of two students were responsible for mapping the urban land use from 1978 and 1988 aerial photographs, field checking their data, conducting occupant surveys, and modeling the increase in runoff due to greenspace converted to parking for storms with 10 year return intervals. As you can see from the graph below, infiltration decreases dramatically once greenspace is converted to informal parking.

In many ways the urban hydrology project was a success. From a teaching stand point, all the students were engaged and excited to collect raw data, analyze and synthesize the data, and develop their own conclusion. From a research stand point, the data and results are currently being used by the city of Burlington to address parking issues.

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