What Black Friday tells us about parking lots

this video was sponsored by Skillshare get two months of free access to thousands of courses by visiting the link in the description Black Friday the day after Thanksgiving is the busiest shopping day of the year in the United States stores often offer great deals to entice shoppers sometimes called door Busters because people literally bust down the door to get to the sale priced merchandise before it sells out its consumerism and its most aggressive all of those shoppers need places to park retail store parking lots are often sized to be large enough to handle Black Friday sized crowds because the last thing the retailers want is to turn away shoppers who can't find a place to park but what if retailers overbuilt their parking you'd have a waste of space pay for no reason that parking could have been better used as leasable buildings earning money instead of costing a retailer money to pave and maintain it and parking lots especially over built ones can spread out buildings and make cities less walkable and generally a lot uglier so if there are any empty parking spaces on Black Friday the busiest day of the year it means that the parking lots are over built so in this video I'm gonna put the parking lots of two shopping centres to the test will there be excess parking let's see what we find and learn a little about parking along the way before I share the results of my little parking survey I want to tell you about my strategy and hypothesis my plan was pretty simple at the most basic level I wanted to go to a couple of retail districts here in the Sacramento region and see how many parking spaces were left on Black Friday I also wanted to have a control or baseline count so he looked at the parking situation in the week before - that way I could also see how much more popular Black Friday is for shoppers when compared to a more normal weekend day I chose two sites for this little experiment the first site is the Roseville Galleria it's a massive indoor mall that opened in 2000 and expanded later to become the largest shopping mall in the Sacramento area it's anchored by a JC Penney's Macy's and Nordstrom there are a lot of swanky brands too but more importantly the Galleria has the only good reason to go to a mall the Lego store the gallery is so serious of a parking that it has two parking garages there's a two-story one over here and a four-story one on the other side adjacent to the Galleria is the Fountains at Roseville a lifestyle center basically is a fancy outdoor mall anchored by a whole I did a whole video on the topic of lifestyle center so go check it out if you want there's also additional retail to the east but I didn't include it in my survey because I already added enough to look at I also chose a site in the Natomas area of Sacramento north of the American River this shopping area is not the regional draw that the Roseville Galleria is but is still a large shopping district that serves a significant part of Sacramento the northeastern half of the area is anchored by a target and includes shopping center staples Barnes & Noble and Bed Bath & Beyond there's also a Best Buy over here this area also includes the promenade a failed lifestyle center seriously this place is a ghost town compared to the fountains at Roseville in the southwest part of the Natomas retail district there's a Home Depot staples Wal Mart and a movie theater these are two large shopping areas but because they serve different roles I hypothesize that the parking situation will be different on Black Friday I thought that the Roseville Galleria would max out its parking it has some luxury brands that the other shopping centers don't which could be a big draw on Black Friday then a Thomas area is anchored by Target and Walmart they will have door Busters for sure but now these happen in the day before on Thanksgiving and there are plenty of targets and Walmart's in the region so I figured there may be more parking spaces than necessary in Natomas armed with my hypotheses I hopped into my minivan and made my way deep into the suburbs I started at the Roseville Galleria on November 23rd I did a quick aerial survey at around 11:00 a.m. and found it to be reasonably busy most of the main parking lots were full or nearly full with only a few aisles having significant parking available the results were the same over in the fountains of Roseville I noticed that there are clearly two overflow parking lots one at the Galleria and another at the fountains I was definitely interested to see if they would fill up in a week again you can't get a sense for the parking garage from above so I decided to head in and check it out to see what the parking situation was in there I found it about half full I didn't drive into the second smaller parking garage but it looked about half full of when I drove by so that's our gallery of baseline about a month before Christmas it was busy but not at max capacity now let's look at Natomas they were considerably more vacant spaces in the target part of the Natomas Center than in the Roseville Galleria and that's probably because besides maybe dye so there's really not much a retailer draw many cars over to this section perhaps this is the equivalent to overflow parking for this center also the Ashley Furniture home store wasn't really drawing in the crowds as expected the promenade was basically empty the Walmart half of Natomas was busier and there were far fewer empty spaces before we get to the Black Friday footage have you ever wondered how parking lots are sized how do real estate developers know they need exactly 2000 spaces for a Walmart Home Depot anchored shopping center well the truth is they don't know exactly but are required to build those spaces by a local government nearly every local government zoning code includes a section on parking minimums or the minimum number of parking spaces that particular land use is required to provide here's a look at the parking minimums in the Roseville zoning code they are functionally very similar to any set of parking minimums anywhere in the US for residential uses the parking minimums are usually listed by unit or by bedroom here you can see that a housing developer is required to provide 1.5 parking spaces per studio which seems high for a tiny unit that's 192 square feet of parking not including aisle space it's close to the size of a small studio itself commercial developments usually calculate their parking requirements by square feet of retail space if you look through them they can seem a little arbitrary banks need one parking space for 250 square feet while an amusement park needs one per 200 square feet and bars need one parking space per 50 square feet there's definitely an ethical problem requiring so much parking and therefore driving to a bar the part of these minimums relevant to our shopping centers is down here it says for general retailer that the developer needs to provide one space for 300 square feet but shopping centers like the one we're interested in need one space for 200 square feet where do these parking minimums come from where do they get these numbers truthfully nobody really knows Donald Shoop a UCLA professor and parking guru calls planning for parking a pseudoscience he wrote a whole wonderful book on parking that I highly recommend he uses the example of funeral parlors to demonstrate the inexact science at developing parking minimums how many parking spaces should a funeral parlor have some cities say one per 100 square feet while others say three per parlor or 10 per parlor or 30 minimum or one per five seats in the chapel they are all based on different things and assume different numbers of parking spaces developers can make the problem more there's an assumption that we go to a store in a suburban area there will be a parking spot available for you somewhere this was one of the defining characteristics of the suburban shopping mall the thing that made it so much better than downtown shopping retail developers take that to mean that there must be a parking spot available to you every hour of every day of the year even on the busiest hour of Black Friday shopping the some parking spaces will stay vacant ninety-nine percent of the time if developers want to build so much parking why have parking minimums at all why not just let the market decide the concern is about spillover effects this is what happens when the parking lot fills up in shoppers parking in an adjacent parking lot without parking minimums some retailers wouldn't build enough parking and hope to freeload off of nearby parking lots parking minimums ensure that each establishment has parking but it also ensures that each lot will likely have more parking than it needs most of the time as support for driving and parking begins to erode in dense cities in the United States some cities have flipped the requirements and now have parking maximums or eliminated parking minimums at least in certain areas for example San Diego eliminated parking requirements for new condos and apartments near mass transit it went even farther by unbundling the cost of parking if you buy or rent a unit in these new buildings you pay separately for a parking space and can opt out to save money by not buying a space at all okay now that we have some parking 101 let's head to Roseville on Black Friday to check out the parking situation ok I just got here and already it's so crazy last time you know traffic was a breeze this time it's crazy I parked in an overflow parking lot last time it had almost the entire lot to myself this time the overflow parking is overflowing and people are parking in an adjacent field so you know let's get the drone up in the air and see what we can see but I'm sure all the parking spaces are going to be taken so let's check it out here's that overflow parking lot from above you can see the overflow overflow I'm talking about people have taken it upon themselves to park in the adjacent field this parking lot is across the street from the fountains the lifestyle center what do the parking lots over there look like well unsurprisingly pretty full not meeting space is available except for a few patchy areas behind Whole Foods there are also a few spots in this random section of the lot but in general it's probably safe to call the fountains at about ninety-eight percent capacity what about the big mall the Galleria remember that overflow parking from last week the one with no cars in it it looks a little different now totally full needless to say the rest of the parking lot is filled as well but what about the parking garages both of them are completely full on the top level a completely different look from a week ago and I think it's safe to assume that all of the parking in the lower levels are full too not only that but yeah people queuing up for parking spaces all over the lot there's even a car parked where it definitely should not be I'm pretty sure we can consider Roseville 100% maxed out or maybe even 101 percent given those cars parked in the field but what about Natomas it's a little bit of a different story here I wanted about 3 p.m. and Black Friday this is the promenade the vacant failed Fountains of Roosevelt copy-cat even on Black Friday it's a ghost town it's also not serving as any sort of overflow parking for other retailers let's move on to Best Buy in Baz mode we can see that it's pretty busy there are still some vacant spaces in the main lot and the two side overflow Lots still have quite a few spaces left to be fair the parking lot was designed for three retailers and the middle storefront is empty if there was a store here the whole lot would probably be closer to capacity so let's take a look at the massive target anchored strip mall next we start at the Burlington Coat Factory and Ashley Furniture home stores plenty of empty spaces here and it honestly doesn't even look that much busier than it did last week this is clearly a case of overbuilt parking over on this side as we start moving to the left we see the big 5 sporting goods Michaels TJ Maxx and Bed Bath & Beyond definitely busy but also quite a few empty spaces you're now going to be walking a mile from your parking space to the front door here it's a little busier than it was a week ago but not drastically target on the other hand is definitely quite busy and busier than we saw a week ago there are a few empty spaces toward Bed Bath and Beyond but otherwise it's packed with cars queuing up to snag a spot as soon as people pull out traffic into the shopping center isn't too bad though no backups or long waits on the other side of target is Alta Old Navy Barnes and Noble and Daiso these areas are also pretty busy was only a few spots vacant here and there at the end of the lot you see a whole lot more empty spaces again suggesting that this parking lot may be somewhat too big for what it needs to be finally let's look across the street at Walmart Home Depot in the movie theater shopping area on first inspection it looks pretty busy but there are some gaps this parking area here has quite a few spaces available probably because they aren't really close to anything in particular there's also the strange pocket of vacant spaces in front of Staples I had to check but yes staples was open and Black Friday it's like someone put a curse on those spaces and nobody wanted to park there the Natomas shopping centers were definitely busy but I put them at maybe about 80% of capacity does this mean that the parking lots are over built today yes but maybe not when the shopping centers and parking lots were first constructed online shopping and the general spreading out of holiday shopping means Black Friday isn't as much of a parking outlier this is a good thing particularly if parking minimums and retailer parking estimates changed to a more even parking pattern means that the parking lots could be smaller so they don't have to accommodate one big day or even a few big hours each year and that land that would've went to parking could stay farms or forests or be buildings instead I chose some pretty big shopping destinations for this little study but when I was driving around the suburbs on Black Friday I noticed that some of the minor shopping centers the strip malls had plenty of available parking maybe I'll do a follow-up study on smaller neighborhood scale areas next year my hypothesis is that there would be a much higher vacancy rate there and if you want to see some really egregious examples of overbuilt parking hop on twitter and check out the hashtag black friday parking people document the worst parking offenders their writing and producing two videos per week makes it easy to get into a little bit of a rut I tend to do what I'm used to so I can make the video faster occasionally I have to remind myself to learn new skills that I can put to use in these videos it keeps the video making process from getting too stale for me and it keeps the videos getting better for you the audience when I need to learn a new skill I turn a skill share I'm always happy to recommend them because I'm absolutely a happy user I've recently been using curse cos gots animation courses to hone my skills I haven't put them to use in a video yet but look out for some improved animation in the future this is one of many high quality courses available at Skillshare the great thing about Skillshare is they have 25,000 classes and everything from design business technology and more the really great thing about Skillshare is that it's super affordable an annual subscription is less than $10 per month join the more than 7 million learners on Skillshare with a two month free trial by visiting the link in the this also helps support the channel so thanks for considering it you

Channel: City Beautiful

Views: 300,600

Rating: 4.8939266 out of 5

Keywords: city planning, town planning, urban planning, urban design, blackfridayparking, black friday, parking minimums, sacramento area, roseville galleria, natomas, target, staples, best buy, Fountains at Roseville, The Promenade, minimum parking requirements, transportation planning, donald shoup

Id: -XscydK-3LI

Length: 13min 46sec (826 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 06 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/alwaysclimbinghigher]

That was awesome!