This garage fills up every morning by 7 a.m., so local officials are building another one.

(Washington D.C. - David Schultz, WAMU) Earlier this week, we told you how some cities in Europe are trying to encourage transit use by making parking more expensive and less convenient.

Officials here in the U.S. - specifically in the D.C. suburb of Montgomery County, Md. - are trying to accomplish the same goal, only through the exact opposite means. They're trying to encourage transit use by building more parking.

Montgomery County officials broke ground this week on a new parking garage at the Glenmont Metro Station, the final station on the D.C. Metro's Red Line. This new garage will double the amount of  available parking at Glenmont, at a cost of more than $24 million - or, in other terms, around $20,000 per parking space. At the groundbreaking ceremony, the officials said this new garage will reduce traffic in Montgomery County by allowing more people to use transit who might otherwise not.

But wait -- how could a garage, a facility whose sole purpose is to make it more convenient to drive, take cars off the road? Wouldn't this just make it easier for people to live far away from transit? We posed those questions to Montgomery County Council Member Nancy Floreen (D) and she answered with a mix of incredulity and resignation.

Have you seen the existing parking garage here, she asked. It fills up by 7:00 in the morning. Sometimes by 6:30. The demand for more parking is tremendous and undeniable. Also, Floreen said, people already live far away from transit. Those people are either going to drive to the Metro, or drive all the way into the city. If we build more parking at transit hubs like Glenmont, they'll choose the former and our roads will be a little less congested.

Cheryl Cort, an anti-sprawl advocate with the Coalition for Smarter Growth, says that's a false choice. Instead of spending $24 million on a new garage at the Glenmont Station, she said, Montgomery County could've taken that money and used it to incentivize a mixed-use development there, with town homes, condos, apartments and the like. That way, people wouldn't need to drive to the Metro because they'd already be living there.

Of course, while that may solve the problem in the long term, in the short term it would still be impossible to find a parking space at the Glenmont Metro Station. Whatever one thinks about the utility of this parking garage or the utility of parking in general - and there is a surprising amount of thought on this topic - that short term problem has been solved. At least for now, until the new garage fills up too.