[Over]parking

I notice this the most when looking at stadiums or performance venues from an aerial. Ridiculous amounts of parking, for what reason….

Convenience.

If alternative transportation to these events were more convenient than driving, paying for a parking space, and waiting an hour in line to park and an hour in line to leave we may see a change.

Having designed retail and entertainement venues for a decade, I can tell you that the parking is there for a reason. It may be empty a good deal of the time, but, the parking is usually designed to a code (5sp per 1000SF is pretty standard or a per-seat number for restaurants). That number exists largely accomodate peak times, such as around holidays. This is especially critical for retail and restaurants who rely very heavily on those days to break even or profit for the year. If there is not enough parking, there are not enough customers, and therefor, not enough money. Municipialities require a certain amount of parking to keep parked vehicles off of the streets and impeding traffic flow, and decreases pedestrian safety if no infrastructure exists to accomodate them. In mixed use settings, peak hours for office, retail, and residential all have to be considered, but the estimates are rarely accurate due to variables in the formulas. You are trying to predict behavior, which is extremely difficult. Of course, there are ways to mitigate the sea of unused parking in the off-seasons, or reduce the code number to 4.5 per 1Ksf or even 3, but that takes away the ability for leasing a center (you never really know what kind of mix of tenants you will end up with). If you have more restaurants which demand more spaces per sf than retail, you might have a huge problem with a lack of spaces available. You can build structures, provide parallel, or best yet, determine cross-easement and design efficiencies. Most engineers, who usually lay out parking lots, do so with little efficiency or design whatsoever. They also don’t take into account the way people acutually use the parking or drive aisles, instead, they design the it they way they THINK it shoud work. I’ve got a new power center near me where someone will die or lose the use of their legs because of how bad the circulation is. I even had to fight CALTRANS once because of the same thing that a “traffic engineer” layed out. Can you say t-bone?

City of charlottesville (and many others I think) went with parking- requirement- free zone for the entire downtown. Coupled with city-produced parking structures – pretty old hat planning by now..Also as someone mentioned, shared parking requirements (church or weekend vs. evening..) and parking reduction for accessiblity to mass transit..Nothing new there, and fairly successful..Also, of course the ‘dual use’ parking lot so popular in shopping malls these days – it’s a parking lot, no its a ‘central square’ for band concerts, etc..
Parking design does not lend itself to creativity – Landscape Standards pretty much gives you all the options..I have trouble believeing the person who said Caltrans laid out an ‘inefficient’ space? Caltrans doesn’t do parking lots, generally, and parking is parking..Or as Kinzler and Ritter used to say, “More Parking Is Better’ for engineers.. The only way you can make it as if ‘someone might break their legs’ is by introducing landscape elements that shut off circulation..Not likely, for Caltrans..

But it is not a two minute walk for most people. If you bring the stores closer to people, it is sprawl. If you build shopping areas in limited places people will drive to get there and need parking once they arrive. The other option that is preached is for everyone to move to urban cores and all is solved. The monkey wrench is that most of us do not actually want to live there so we either need to get there to do our shopping or allow some shopping opportunities to be nearer to us or easily accessed by us. Actually, more often than not most people are content with a little of all three and some people actually enjoy living in the urban core (have at it).

There is basically three ways for retail stores to operate – large shopping areas, or down town, or out in areas to sell to local people and/or passers by. All of which serve society whether they have consequences or not. All of them create difficulty for people as well. I’m glad that we have various options to how we want to live. I’m also glad that we have and continue to make strides to make these all work better with less negative consequences. What I don’t like are the movements to put one lifestyle ahead of all others like a fundamentalist religion (that is one thing that I do not like about new urbanism).

Another aspect to consider is whether or not the walkable community can completely support the business, or if the business depends on outsiders in order to be available to the adjacent community.

We completed a “sustainable” parking lot in downtown Charleston, SC this past year, lots of permeable materials and we won a BZA request to reduce the parking space widths from 9′ to 8′ to increase the sq. ft. of greenspace.

http://seanhoelscher.blogspot.com/2009/10/1315-george-st-sustainable-prking-lot.html