4 ms·

Not really. Building your parking lot for peak demand has a very, very high opportunity cost. You could instead surround your business with other uses (like h

Not really. Building your parking lot for peak demand has a very, very high opportunity cost. You could instead surround your business with other uses (like housing) resulting in a greater increase in steady-state business traffic that more than offsets whatever you forego from congestion on that peak day. It is also true that small businesses almost universally overestimate the fraction of their customers arriving by car. In Oakland they surveyed the merchants on a street, who estimated 90% of their customers came by car, which is quite impossible given the streetscape. Careful observation revealed it was the inverse: only 10% arrived by car. Also the people who arrived on foot spent the most and the people in the cars spent the least. Streetsblog has covered the topic of wastefully overprovisioning your parking capacity for peaks, as well as the topic of merchant perception of transportation mode. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/12/01/the-spectacular-waste-of-half-empty-black-friday-parking-lots/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/12/01/the-spectacular-waste...

microcolonel 8y ago
> You could instead surround your business with other uses (like housing) resulting in a greater increase in steady-state business traffic that more than offsets whatever you forego from congestion on that peak day. Only if your customer demographic is very generic (customer locality), or your employees are young/desperate (employee locality); and sure, lots of businesses are like this, but how many? I personally think the opposite approach: undoing zoning restrictions on small and medium commercial operations mixed directly into residential areas, and vice versa; I think this lines up with the effect you note in your Oakland anecdote.
burfog 8y ago
You underestimate the loss. It isn't just that businesses lose customers when the parking is full. People don't want to drive there and then have to turn back, so many won't take the risk. The lots may only be 70% full, but the chance that they might be 100% full is enough to make people go elsewhere. Customers expect dependable service. It's the same with operating hours. If you make your hours completely random, with a decent chance of being closed when customers show up, nobody will bother to make the trip.

microcolonel 8y ago

> You could instead surround your business with other uses (like housing) resulting in a greater increase in steady-state business traffic that more than offsets whatever you forego from congestion on that peak day. Only if your customer demographic is very generic (customer locality), or your employees are young/desperate (employee locality); and sure, lots of businesses are like this, but how many? I personally think the opposite approach: undoing zoning restrictions on small and medium commercial operations mixed directly into residential areas, and vice versa; I think this lines up with the effect you note in your Oakland anecdote.

burfog 8y ago

You underestimate the loss. It isn't just that businesses lose customers when the parking is full. People don't want to drive there and then have to turn back, so many won't take the risk. The lots may only be 70% full, but the chance that they might be 100% full is enough to make people go elsewhere. Customers expect dependable service. It's the same with operating hours. If you make your hours completely random, with a decent chance of being closed when customers show up, nobody will bother to make the trip.