Car Parking Problems – Park Free Opens Big Mall to Edge City Issues

You head for a regional mall to do some shopping. You drive halfway around its ring road and enter one of the many large surrounding parking lots. It’s a bit busy today but still you  park only about 12 or 15 cars from a store entrance. There’s plenty of parking, the parking is free, you feel very safe with all the other people coming and going in the parking lot, and your walk takes only a minute or two. Once inside you have a climate controlled stroll past several hundred different stores, like the downtown you experienced growing up – but even better because you’re never exposed to any bad weather problems. You spend an hour or two shopping, then head for a close-by restaurant to meet friends for lunch. You get in your car and drive once again, even though it’s only a thousand or so feet away. You park again, free and conveniently, with another short to the restaurant’s entrance.

 Another day, you drive to a smaller mall, a “strip mall”, and the free parking is even more convenient, the walk to the cleaners or drugstore only fifty or a hundred feet. Maybe you also go to an office building or to a big box retailer (Think Wal-Mart, Target or Home Depot) with the same parking convenience. There are all kinds of free standing commercial buildings located an easy drive of five miles or less, each with its own surface parking lot. The City Administrators, through stringent zoning controls, have dictated how many parking spaces are required for each kind of business activity – from malls to offices to restaurants to medical centers, etc. And each one guards its parking spaces from intrusion by parkers who might be going elsewhere. Transportation analysts cite this as the reason for undesirable suburban sprawl – requiring everybody to get into their personal car, to go anywhere. And it all gets worse as malls, and the areas surrounding them grow and expand.

Growth of Regional Malls

 Regional malls that start out relatively small, keep on growing over the years – sometimes in exceptional terms. Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, started as a regional mall in the late 60’s, with one to one and a half million square feet of shopping space. In the 70’s it added hotels and office buildings, growing to house some 30,000 employees. By 2008 it had grown to 120,000 jobs and 28 million square feet of office space. It also included huge amounts of parking space – about 40 million square feet in total, enough to house 135,000 cars! It has more parking than jobs; more parking than office space; more parking than in downtown Washington, D.C. One visitor is quoted as saying: “It’s almost impossible to walk here”. Yet current planning is underway to grow it even further.

The Houston Galleria mall opened in 1970 with 600,000 square feet of retail shopping space. By 1986 it had expanded to 1.6 million square feet of retail, plus office space and two hotels. By 2003 it had further expanded to 2.4 million square feet of shopping, with other upscale shopping centers nearby, plus it included three big office towers.

How do you transform such traffic-clogged “edge cities” into vibrant, people-oriented, park only once, downtowns? What do you do with all those building isolating parking lots and structures? ITS-Park offers appropriate – and needed - new answers.