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I meant a restaurant would build parking for the maximum number of customers it gets at a given time (for a restaurant maybe Friday night). Ditto with a supermarket or office park. Since different places have different usage timings, there will be unused parking spaces. How much, I'm not sure.
I did follow your post. I'm more disagreeing with wburg, I guess, who keeps talking about how every car needs like 4-8 parking spaces. That is just not true. Most of these spaces are shared with many other cars.
I did follow your post. I'm more disagreeing with wburg, I guess, who keeps talking about how every car needs like 4-8 parking spaces. That is just not true. Most of these spaces are shared with many other cars.
I think the situation I described might gives wburg's 4-8 parking spaces / car ratio. But we need to find numbers somewhere of what real-life auto-centric areas are rather than just argueing off our intuitions.
For discussion, at the city I work for, the parking requirement for a restaurant is 1 stall per 100 square feet of gross floor area of the restaurant. If it is a fast food restaurant, it is 1 stall per 75 square feet.
I don't think every car needs 4-8 parking spaces--personally, I think we have way too many parking spaces (and way too many cars) but counts of parking spaces estimate that every car may have 4-8 parking spaces, depending on the city:
But a key finding in Pijanowski's research is the ratio of parking spaces to vehicles. In Tippecanoe County, at least, there are three times as many spaces as registered passenger vehicles. And there are 11 times as many spaces as families, his yet-to-be-published study found.
According to a new regional survey, the states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin together have 1,260 square kilometers of paved parking lots, or 5% of urban land use. That's about 2.5 parking spaces per car, but that's not even counting street parking, private parkings, and parking structures. If you add all of this together, you get about 3 to 3.5 parkings per car and a higher percentage of urban land use.
When the Berkeley researchers crunched the numbers, they came up with five scenarios of available U.S. parking that ranged from 105 million spots to 2 billion. Give or take, I guess.The most likely estimate points to roughly 800 million spaces across the country
The final case was the most extreme of the scenarios. The researchers extrapolated on a rule of thumb used by urban planners that claims eight parking spaces exist for every one car.
It might come as a surprise to some, but pretty much all cities in the U.S. (and the world) have only a vague idea of how many parking spaces (public and private) they have. But now there's a sizeable exception: San Francisco spent the past 18 months counting its parking spaces. Total: 441,541 spaces. Over 280,000 on streets, 25,000 of which are metered.
There's this from a 1954 Chicago parking lot design guideline. It looks at the parking lots of regional shopping center and the relation to the size of their parking lots.
Looks like the rule of thumb was 3 square feet of parking per 1 square foot of store space in shopping centers.
Quote:
One of my clients who has made a study of parking believes that space should be provided for all the cars that go to a plaza or shopping center during the rush hour on the day before Christmas. Figure that one out…
That's a rule I have heard before--the parking lot should be big enough to fit all the customers who might be in the store during the Christmas rush. That's what makes the "wide open spaces" of the suburbs--parking lots. Lots and lots of parking lots.
Looks like the rule of thumb was 3 square feet of parking per 1 square foot of store space in shopping centers.
That's a rule I have heard before--the parking lot should be big enough to fit all the customers who might be in the store during the Christmas rush. That's what makes the "wide open spaces" of the suburbs--parking lots. Lots and lots of parking lots.
If people can't get to the stores, they won't buy stuff -- they'll go somewhere else they can get to. For retail, losing customers during the Christmas rush can be the difference between profitability and bankruptcy. That's why, e.g. the mighty King of Prussia (PA) Mall has enormous parking lots with outer sections which are empty most of the year. They do indeed fill up during Christmas.
I don't think it's 3:1 though. More like 1:1, enclosed area versus parking area. I haven't been able to find official figures on either, however.
If people can't get to the stores, they won't buy stuff -- they'll go somewhere else they can get to. For retail, losing customers during the Christmas rush can be the difference between profitability and bankruptcy. That's why, e.g. the mighty King of Prussia (PA) Mall has enormous parking lots with outer sections which are empty most of the year. They do indeed fill up during Christmas.
I don't think it's 3:1 though. More like 1:1, enclosed area versus parking area. I haven't been able to find official figures on either, however.
Depending on the layout of the area and type of store (obviously not for a mall) the customers could use street parking and walk a bit during the busiest times.
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