Downtown Birmingham ranked 41st out of 87 city centers for the percentage of land dedicated to parking in a study conducted by the Parking Reform Network, a national group dedicated to parking reform.

Parking takes up 26% of the available land in downtown Birmingham, according to the study. This is slightly above the average amount, 22%, found across the 87 U.S. metro areas with populations over 1 million that are included in the study.

“The prevalence of parking lots in Birmingham, they act as cavities in the city,” said Daniel Christiansen, acting chair of the Alabama Urbanists Coalition. “As you walk downtown from place to place, you’ll see a dead spot and usually that’s a parking lot. I would say that, in many ways, they separate people from each other and cause issues creating real community and real neighborly connections in the areas where they’re most concentrated.”

Birmingham received an overall parking score of 55 on the study’s scale of 1-100, which indicates how much land is dedicated solely to parking in a city center.

City center parking scores are determined by taking the difference between a city’s parking footprint and the average parking footprint for a metro area of that size according to the Parking Reform Network website. These comparisons were done to ensure that metros were evaluated on an equal basis since some included in the study are much larger than others, the site said.