A couple weeks ago, I pulled into the parking garage of a San Fernando Valley office building, and I was struck by how many parking spaces were wasted because of poor parkers. Every third or fourth car it seemed straddled the line that separates one parking stall from the next.
Then it hit me: the cars invaded their neighbor’s space not necessarily because of bad parkers. It was because SUVs, minivans and full-sized cars were parked in stalls marked “Compact cars only.” Why? Because the garage had way too many spaces for compact cars. Drivers of bigger vehicles were pretty much pushed into parking in small spaces. Even today, during the pandemic that’s thinned-out garages nationwide, there still aren’t always enough full-sized parking slots.
Then another thought hit me. Didn’t I write a column about this very thing shortly after I arrived in the San Fernando Valley? I looked it up.
Headlined “The Scourge of Compact Parking Spaces,” it was published 5 years ago. Here is an edited version:
In my 10 months in the San Fernando Valley, it has finally occurred to me that there’s one sign that I dread above others. That sign is this: Compact Cars Only.
Oh, sure, it’s a seemingly benign sign that’s common in parking garages. Maybe that’s why it has taken me so long to tumble to the fact that seeing that simple everyday sign means that irritation, vexation and frustration will quickly follow.
The problem is that the San Fernando Valley has an excess number of parking spaces designed for compact cars. If small-car parking spaces could be exported, we’d be like OPEC. Why so many? Maybe it’s because so much of the Valley was built out when small cars were popular and SUVs were random letters. Maybe it’s because developers here want to boost the number of parking spaces they can report. Regardless, we’ve got a plethora, a surfeit, an overarching overabundance of those maddeningly slim parking slots.
Here’s why they’re so bad: They create wasted space. Since there aren’t enough regular-sized slots for today’s SUVs and minivans, big-vehicle drivers are all but forced to use the stalls designed for compact cars. And the big cars inevitably encroach on the spaces next to them, rendering too many of those spaces unusably skinny.
This hit me last week when I drove to a local hospital for a business meeting. It seemed to me that as I drove up the parking structure, compact-only car stalls lined what seemed to be half the garage and each row had at least one open space that tempted me. But each time I got a closer look, I saw that one or both of the vehicles on the sides had encroached into the open stall between them. I couldn’t have wedged my smallish car into any of those spaces without scraping paint.
I made my way to the top of the full garage and pondered my options – probably the same ones you face more often than you’d like. Create a rogue space by parking on the end of an aisle? Drive to a neighborhood and find street parking? Give up and go home? Instead I joined a slow procession of three other cars, circling like buzzards waiting for someone to depart.
Eventually I got a space, but I couldn’t help lament the eight or 10 “open” parking spaces that were too skinny for any wheeled conveyance other than a skateboard. A thought, a counterintuitive thought, occurred to me: Had there not been so many compact stalls, we buzzards could have parked right away.
When I returned to my own office building’s garage – which also has way too many compact parking spaces – I stopped to take a tally. In one row, I counted 15 regular-sized car stalls, each capable of comfortably accommodating a vehicle. Across the aisle, a comparable row for compact cars had 16 stalls. However, only 14 were usable because of all the full-sized cars and minivans and SUVs that invaded their neighbor’s space.
Put simpler: Fewer cars were able to park in the compact row.
Think of all the counterintuitive things you know. Calm people are more productive than the frantically busy. It’s safer to skydive than attend a dance party. The more sophisticated the political poll, the more mistaken the prognostication.
And now, you can add this to your list of odd counterintuitive facts: The more compact stalls a garage has, the fewer cars it can accommodate.
Note to developers, office building landlords and retail center owners: Please, please, please stop building so many compact parking spaces. If you’ve got them already, convert most of them to regular spaces. I swear, you’ll increase your parking capacity. And you’ll lower the blood pressure of your workers, customers and grateful visitors.
That’s what I wrote in January 2017. Today, let me add this: Since there are fewer parkers today and possibly into the future because of the work-from-home movement, now is a perfect time for you, building operators, to finally get rid of 60 percent, 70 percent, even 80 percent of your compact spaces.