How Much Parking Would the Minnesota State Fair Need if Most People Drove There

[State Fair aerial with ten new parking ramps.]

The Minnesota State Fair kicked off yesterday Thursday in St. Paul/Falcon Heights. I wonder if the local media will cover it? In case they don’t, here’s a thought experiment. 

It came to me when I was on Como Avenue the other day staring at the poor schmuck directing traffic in and out of the parking lot for a state fair preview event, and thinking about the following question: What would the Minnesota State Fair look like if it had the same “mode share” as downtown Minneapolis? 

Most people don’t drive to the fair, because there’s nowhere to park and the traffic is insane. But if they did, how much parking you’d we need? 

Here’s the back of the napkin math:

The state fair all-time attendance record is 270,426, not counting the farm animals.

The downtown Minneapolis 2019 mode share is 40% single-occupancy vehicles and 28% in multi-person private vehicles. (The rest use transit, bike, or walk.)

Based on that rather generous ratio, how much parking would you need to accommodate the state fair

40% single-occupancy drivers equates to 108,105 parking spaces

Plus 28% of that (divided by 2 people in each car) is another 30,287 parking spaces

That gives us a rough total of 130,292 cars to park. Let’s be generous and assume that each space turns over once a day, so we can divide that in half to around 65,000. For comparison, when combined, the two seven-story Mall of America parking ramps hold about 12,000 cars. 

By my napkin calculation, the State Fair thus would need around five times the parking that exists at the Mall of America. Here’s my very lazy rendition of that, at scale.

In other words, take the bus or bike to the fair!

[Glorious!]