We define the notion of a hierarchically cocompact classifying space for a family of subgroups of a group. Our main application is to show that the mapping class group Mod ( S ) of any connected oriented compact surface S , possibly with punctures and boundary components and with negative Euler characteristic has a hierarchically cocompact model for the family of virtually cyclic subgroups of dimension at most vcd Mod ( S ) + 1 . When the surface is closed, we prove that this bound is optimal. In particular, this answers a question of Lück for mapping class groups of surfaces
