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Customers come in cars because there's no other way to get there. Cars, being hugely inefficient uses of space, actually decreases the number of customers who c

Customers come in cars because there's no other way to get there. Cars, being hugely inefficient uses of space, actually decreases the number of customers who can get to your store. You can take a fully-packed car and compare the space used to people on a sidewalk: that's the difference in customers you're losing out on.

VLM 13y ago
Seriously? So the best way to get more people in a sports stadium would be to get rid of the parking lot, or walmart's sales would go up if they got rid of their parking lots? Or on a small scale, I'd be more likely to go to a restaurant or small retailer if I knew for certain I couldn't get there on foot and if I drove there, I wouldn't be able to park? Now I do see your point for a stereotypical neighborhood local bar where they shouldn't be driving drunk anyway, or even a small local pharmacy or convenience store/gas station. I've seen poor parts of downtown with empty sidewalks and boarded up storefronts. Must be the parking lots?
- thrownaway2424 13y ago
  The principle of charity has long since expired and now we are left to ponder whether you've ever even been to a city. To answer your question, yes, the best way to get people to a stadium is, by far, to remove the parking lot. Here's one of the most well-attended MLB stadiums in the country. It's served by two streetcar lines and a mainline railroad. https://www.google.com/maps/preview/@37.779165,-122.390703,3a,75y,79.92h,94.55t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sgOor2VIW6zcDwyQCEsYTfA!2e0 https://www.google.com/maps/preview/@37.779165,-122.390703,3... Here's Wrigley Field: https://www.google.com/maps/preview/@41.949016,-87.655596,3a,75y,101.36h,79.79t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sZG47gz5jCGeHFtqN6Y4NAA!2e0 https://www.google.com/maps/preview/@41.949016,-87.655596,3a... At Yankee stadium they built a parking garage and so few people use it that the garage operator is bankrupt. They are tearing them down. The stadium is served by a subway line and Metro North even has a station literally called "Yankees". I suggest you get out of Mom's basement and see the country before holding forth on its infrastructure.
  - chrismcb 13y ago
    You are going to compare most of America to New York? The city with perhaps the best American public transport, and the lowest per capita car ownership? I'd rather take public transit to a stadium (barring the recent super bowl) but due to poor public transportation in some places I don't have a choice. The solution isn't to decrease parking lots first. The solution is to improve public transportation, then you can remove the parking lots.
    - thrownaway2424 13y ago
      New York isn't some kind of rare case. 6% of Americans live in the NYC metro area. That's the thing about cities and suburbs: tons of people live in cities, by their nature, and relatively few people live in the suburbs, by their nature as well. If more people lived in the suburbs, they'd turn into cities. Anyway yes, I am comparing. The article is about the form of urban spaces and how it can better balance the needs of all users, in light of the fact that extant american streetscapes strongly favor the car over all other users. The claim was made that stadia require parking lots. Examples of the opposite were given. The fact that in some places you don't have a choice simply reflects on the inadequate urban forms that are found in many suburbs in the USA.
      - Spooky23 13y ago
        The New York City metro area is about 25M people, 8M live in NYC itself. It's an area stretching from eastern Pennsylvania to Suffolk County, and Central Jersey to Kingston, ny and Commecticut. Lots and lots of people live in the New York suburbs, millions actually. They left the city because the costs of living there are just too high. Many/most businesses did too. Many of the buildings in the manhattan skyline are mostly empty. The diversified industry and commercial businesses that made NYC such a powerhouse of economic activity in my dad's youth are long gone. (To suburban hellholes in the South)
- sosuke 13y ago
  Since I can't reply to throwaway, sports stadiums in major cities offload their parking lots to the surrounding areas, or even far out and add in shuttle service. They still have parking, just not in the form of a giant parking lot. http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/sf/images/ballpark/y2010/transportationmap_600x900.gif http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/sf/images/ballpark/y2010/... http://chicago.cubs.mlb.com/chc/ballpark/transportation/ http://chicago.cubs.mlb.com/chc/ballpark/transportation/
  - thrownaway2424 13y ago
    All the parking lots on that SF map are slated for construction. http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2013/04/12/mission_rock_gets_ready_to_play_ball.php http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2013/04/12/mission_rock_gets_r...
    - sosuke 13y ago
      Wow that is nuts! SF is really facing some big problems, I hope other cities can learn from their successes and mistakes. Though I still love my parking spaces.
- halostatue 13y ago
  It works nicely in Toronto, with two sports facilities (a stadium and an arena) easily accessible by transit (the SkyDome^wRoger Centre and the Air Canada Centre), and a third reasonably accessible by transit (BMO Field). Based on the concerts that I've been to at the ACC in the last few months, at least half of the people attending take transit to downtown (although some park at edge transit parking lots).
- pyre 13y ago
  > I've seen poor parts of downtown with empty sidewalks and boarded up storefronts. Must be the parking lots? The poor parts of town don't have much money because... they are the poor parts of town, maybe? Just maybe? BTW, sports stadiums would probably benefit from lack of a parking lot in a reduction of the number of drunk driving accidents in the surrounding area.
- saraid216 13y ago
  > So the best way to get more people in a sports stadium would be to get rid of the parking lot The googling is taking too long for me to get numbers, but I'd be willing to bet that most stadiums have enough seating capacity that, if you were to pack every single space in their actual parking lots with cars, you'd completely fail to fill it up. > or walmart's sales would go up if they got rid of their parking lots? Walmart is a special case in that it's built around people who have cars: you don't go to a Walmart to buy only what you can carry. You go there to buy as much as you can so that you can avoid shopping for the rest of the week. But around here, Pike Place Market? Westlake Center? Pacific Place? Yeah. Most of their business comes from the fact that they're within walking distance from the Financial District and the Convention Center. Uwajimaya? Benefits immensely from the fact that it's located in Chinatown, where its main market is; I'm two blocks from it and I pick up something every other day on my way home from work. (Actually, Uwajimaya is brilliant in that it has apartments on top and parking below. A lot of residents are literally walking through the store to go home.) > Or on a small scale, I'd be more likely to go to a restaurant or small retailer if I knew for certain I couldn't get there on foot and if I drove there, I wouldn't be able to park? No, you're reversing it. The question is about how many more customers a restaurant or small retailer would get. I didn't fully explain: it starts by recognizing that the number of customers you get is a percentage of the number of potential customers you get. If you already knew about that restaurant 50 miles out, then obviously, the only thing that matters is that you can get there. That's a transit issue: can you get to point B from point A in a reasonable amount of time, for a given understanding of reasonable. Some people cannot imagine reasonable amounts of time via public transit, so they cannot conceive of transit without cars. That's a different problem. The problem here is that, using a "cars = customers" model, you have two facts: (a) most people don't look at the storefronts as they drive by. They're actually looking for parking. Your parking space is a loss leader in order to get them to look at what you're selling in the first place, on their way somewhere else. And (b), people don't know you exist until they see you. If you already knew about it, then it's more akin to parking at your office. You have no need for discoverability, just availability. If you had magical public transit that was equally fast, you could use it instead and poof. No need for cars at all. The merits of cars versus other things isn't customers; it's speed. > I've seen poor parts of downtown with empty sidewalks and boarded up storefronts. Must be the parking lots? In short, yes. What if those parking lots were cheap housing instead? You wouldn't need a car to get there, and you could walk across the street to shop. This isn't a silver bullet "delete parking lots = magically better". It's a functional component of many other much larger, much more complex solutions. I'm telling you why the component is being included--namely the space efficiency of pedestrians equals a higher customer base--but that isn't a complete solution by any means. I mentioned a and b earlier. There is a c. Anytime your parking lot isn't nearly full during business hours, you have a problem. Why? The reason that cars = customers is because cars forcibly disallow anyone else from being a customer. When you design your street for cars, you discourage pedestrians: especially the window shoppers. When you design your neighborhoods to be zoned between residential and commerce, you make it impossible to reach businesses except by car or long-distance public transit. My grandparents live in a suburban cul-de-sac in the Bay Area. Pretty place. Very calm and peaceful. And they're lonely. My parents and uncles and aunts have to regularly drive in from across town to visit with them. Couldn't they go down to the local store, rather than asking a son or daughter-in-law to buy groceries? Nope. They're too frail to drive, and walking the massive block to the huge nearby intersection, and then walking across the vast expanse of asphalt to the nearby Lucky's is basically impossible. Hell, I hate doing it and I jog the whole thing for fun. There isn't even anything on the way to stop at. There's like... one bench for the bus stop. A Radio Shack on the other side of the 3-lane road. There are actually quite a few other options; they're just even further away. You basically need a car to get to what is technically a block and a half away, if we count by intersection. My god-grandparents would be in a similar situation, but they're able to drive, so they can do the 20 or so blocks it takes to get to the Asian market. It wasn't always a Lucky's. It used to be an Albertson's, I think. And it was something else before that. That parking space keeps them alive, sure. That's about it. No one goes there unless they have to. (And if I'd spent the time googling rather than typing up these anecdotes, maybe I would have found some damn numbers.)
sliverstorm 13y ago
If the parking lot is not full, how do you figure?
- saraid216 13y ago
  If the parking lot is not full, you're getting even fewer customers, because you're losing out on even the choked trickle that comes from cars. You don't want it to be completely full: churn needs to happen. But at less than, (out of my ass), 80% and you have space being taken up by a potential car that isn't producing any value for you. This isn't different from a warehouse for your inventory. You don't want it to be full; in an ideal situation, the size of your warehouse is the amount that you sell over X period of time. If you have inventory sitting there, it's not being sold. Similarly, if you have parking spaces not being used, it's not making you money.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Err... questions of optimal parking lot utilization does not explain why cars reduce the number of visitors you get.
    - saraid216 13y ago
      I explained that in the comment you responded to. You're the one who brought up parking lot utilization.
      - sliverstorm 13y ago
        Maybe I'm just being dense right now, but you said: Cars [...] actually decreases the number of customers who can get to your store. I don't see how the comment I replied to proves/explains that statement.
        saraid216 13y ago
        > You can take a fully-packed car and compare the space used to people on a sidewalk: that's the difference in customers you're losing out on. Fully-packed car. That's 4 to 6 people. A parking space is about 153 square feet in size. [1] A single person takes up about 7 to 10 square feet to be comfortable. [2] (Fair cop: I'm not making any measurements here.) That's 9 people you're failing to serve by providing a parking space. That's assuming everything is ideal for the car: that it's filled with 6 people, that every parking space is being used by a car filled with 6 people. (I would guesstimate the average car occupancy is 2.5ish.) Let's further assume my math is crap and the numbers are non-ideal and round it down to 5. (Yes, I just chopped off 50% from the size of my claim.) That's still a ~50% loss. That's the back-of-the-napkin math. In reality, it's more complicated. It asks what you replace the parking space with. It asks what the sidewalk capacity actually is and whether or not that would change if you replaced the parking space with (blank). It asks what the layout of the entire city is and how the public transportation system is and how the city helps inform its residents of your establishment. It asks how happy a customer is when they walk in your store and whether or not that changes the tone of your business. But these are questions that can't be addressed by "cars = customers" anyways. As I explain elsewhere on the thread, designing for cars naturally discourages other forms of traffic. That's a complicate claim and is explored across many, many books on urban design. So we simplify. If the original claim is that a car represents a customer, then my challenge is to look at the space taken up by a car and see what you lose as a result. The easiest number to get is this: 5 customers, ideally. [1] http://www.timhaahs.com/index.php/site/dbdetail/1_what_is_the_appropriate_size_for_a_parking_space/ http://www.timhaahs.com/index.php/site/dbdetail/1_what_is_th... [2] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_square_feet_does_a_person_take_up_standing_up http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_square_feet_does_a_person...

VLM 13y ago

Seriously? So the best way to get more people in a sports stadium would be to get rid of the parking lot, or walmart's sales would go up if they got rid of their parking lots? Or on a small scale, I'd be more likely to go to a restaurant or small retailer if I knew for certain I couldn't get there on foot and if I drove there, I wouldn't be able to park? Now I do see your point for a stereotypical neighborhood local bar where they shouldn't be driving drunk anyway, or even a small local pharmacy or convenience store/gas station. I've seen poor parts of downtown with empty sidewalks and boarded up storefronts. Must be the parking lots?

thrownaway2424 13y ago
The principle of charity has long since expired and now we are left to ponder whether you've ever even been to a city. To answer your question, yes, the best way to get people to a stadium is, by far, to remove the parking lot. Here's one of the most well-attended MLB stadiums in the country. It's served by two streetcar lines and a mainline railroad. https://www.google.com/maps/preview/@37.779165,-122.390703,3a,75y,79.92h,94.55t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sgOor2VIW6zcDwyQCEsYTfA!2e0 https://www.google.com/maps/preview/@37.779165,-122.390703,3... Here's Wrigley Field: https://www.google.com/maps/preview/@41.949016,-87.655596,3a,75y,101.36h,79.79t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sZG47gz5jCGeHFtqN6Y4NAA!2e0 https://www.google.com/maps/preview/@41.949016,-87.655596,3a... At Yankee stadium they built a parking garage and so few people use it that the garage operator is bankrupt. They are tearing them down. The stadium is served by a subway line and Metro North even has a station literally called "Yankees". I suggest you get out of Mom's basement and see the country before holding forth on its infrastructure.
- chrismcb 13y ago
  You are going to compare most of America to New York? The city with perhaps the best American public transport, and the lowest per capita car ownership? I'd rather take public transit to a stadium (barring the recent super bowl) but due to poor public transportation in some places I don't have a choice. The solution isn't to decrease parking lots first. The solution is to improve public transportation, then you can remove the parking lots.
  - thrownaway2424 13y ago
    New York isn't some kind of rare case. 6% of Americans live in the NYC metro area. That's the thing about cities and suburbs: tons of people live in cities, by their nature, and relatively few people live in the suburbs, by their nature as well. If more people lived in the suburbs, they'd turn into cities. Anyway yes, I am comparing. The article is about the form of urban spaces and how it can better balance the needs of all users, in light of the fact that extant american streetscapes strongly favor the car over all other users. The claim was made that stadia require parking lots. Examples of the opposite were given. The fact that in some places you don't have a choice simply reflects on the inadequate urban forms that are found in many suburbs in the USA.
    - Spooky23 13y ago
      The New York City metro area is about 25M people, 8M live in NYC itself. It's an area stretching from eastern Pennsylvania to Suffolk County, and Central Jersey to Kingston, ny and Commecticut. Lots and lots of people live in the New York suburbs, millions actually. They left the city because the costs of living there are just too high. Many/most businesses did too. Many of the buildings in the manhattan skyline are mostly empty. The diversified industry and commercial businesses that made NYC such a powerhouse of economic activity in my dad's youth are long gone. (To suburban hellholes in the South)
sosuke 13y ago
Since I can't reply to throwaway, sports stadiums in major cities offload their parking lots to the surrounding areas, or even far out and add in shuttle service. They still have parking, just not in the form of a giant parking lot. http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/sf/images/ballpark/y2010/transportationmap_600x900.gif http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/sf/images/ballpark/y2010/... http://chicago.cubs.mlb.com/chc/ballpark/transportation/ http://chicago.cubs.mlb.com/chc/ballpark/transportation/
- thrownaway2424 13y ago
  All the parking lots on that SF map are slated for construction. http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2013/04/12/mission_rock_gets_ready_to_play_ball.php http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2013/04/12/mission_rock_gets_r...
  - sosuke 13y ago
    Wow that is nuts! SF is really facing some big problems, I hope other cities can learn from their successes and mistakes. Though I still love my parking spaces.
halostatue 13y ago
It works nicely in Toronto, with two sports facilities (a stadium and an arena) easily accessible by transit (the SkyDome^wRoger Centre and the Air Canada Centre), and a third reasonably accessible by transit (BMO Field). Based on the concerts that I've been to at the ACC in the last few months, at least half of the people attending take transit to downtown (although some park at edge transit parking lots).
pyre 13y ago
> I've seen poor parts of downtown with empty sidewalks and boarded up storefronts. Must be the parking lots? The poor parts of town don't have much money because... they are the poor parts of town, maybe? Just maybe? BTW, sports stadiums would probably benefit from lack of a parking lot in a reduction of the number of drunk driving accidents in the surrounding area.
saraid216 13y ago
> So the best way to get more people in a sports stadium would be to get rid of the parking lot The googling is taking too long for me to get numbers, but I'd be willing to bet that most stadiums have enough seating capacity that, if you were to pack every single space in their actual parking lots with cars, you'd completely fail to fill it up. > or walmart's sales would go up if they got rid of their parking lots? Walmart is a special case in that it's built around people who have cars: you don't go to a Walmart to buy only what you can carry. You go there to buy as much as you can so that you can avoid shopping for the rest of the week. But around here, Pike Place Market? Westlake Center? Pacific Place? Yeah. Most of their business comes from the fact that they're within walking distance from the Financial District and the Convention Center. Uwajimaya? Benefits immensely from the fact that it's located in Chinatown, where its main market is; I'm two blocks from it and I pick up something every other day on my way home from work. (Actually, Uwajimaya is brilliant in that it has apartments on top and parking below. A lot of residents are literally walking through the store to go home.) > Or on a small scale, I'd be more likely to go to a restaurant or small retailer if I knew for certain I couldn't get there on foot and if I drove there, I wouldn't be able to park? No, you're reversing it. The question is about how many more customers a restaurant or small retailer would get. I didn't fully explain: it starts by recognizing that the number of customers you get is a percentage of the number of potential customers you get. If you already knew about that restaurant 50 miles out, then obviously, the only thing that matters is that you can get there. That's a transit issue: can you get to point B from point A in a reasonable amount of time, for a given understanding of reasonable. Some people cannot imagine reasonable amounts of time via public transit, so they cannot conceive of transit without cars. That's a different problem. The problem here is that, using a "cars = customers" model, you have two facts: (a) most people don't look at the storefronts as they drive by. They're actually looking for parking. Your parking space is a loss leader in order to get them to look at what you're selling in the first place, on their way somewhere else. And (b), people don't know you exist until they see you. If you already knew about it, then it's more akin to parking at your office. You have no need for discoverability, just availability. If you had magical public transit that was equally fast, you could use it instead and poof. No need for cars at all. The merits of cars versus other things isn't customers; it's speed. > I've seen poor parts of downtown with empty sidewalks and boarded up storefronts. Must be the parking lots? In short, yes. What if those parking lots were cheap housing instead? You wouldn't need a car to get there, and you could walk across the street to shop. This isn't a silver bullet "delete parking lots = magically better". It's a functional component of many other much larger, much more complex solutions. I'm telling you why the component is being included--namely the space efficiency of pedestrians equals a higher customer base--but that isn't a complete solution by any means. I mentioned a and b earlier. There is a c. Anytime your parking lot isn't nearly full during business hours, you have a problem. Why? The reason that cars = customers is because cars forcibly disallow anyone else from being a customer. When you design your street for cars, you discourage pedestrians: especially the window shoppers. When you design your neighborhoods to be zoned between residential and commerce, you make it impossible to reach businesses except by car or long-distance public transit. My grandparents live in a suburban cul-de-sac in the Bay Area. Pretty place. Very calm and peaceful. And they're lonely. My parents and uncles and aunts have to regularly drive in from across town to visit with them. Couldn't they go down to the local store, rather than asking a son or daughter-in-law to buy groceries? Nope. They're too frail to drive, and walking the massive block to the huge nearby intersection, and then walking across the vast expanse of asphalt to the nearby Lucky's is basically impossible. Hell, I hate doing it and I jog the whole thing for fun. There isn't even anything on the way to stop at. There's like... one bench for the bus stop. A Radio Shack on the other side of the 3-lane road. There are actually quite a few other options; they're just even further away. You basically need a car to get to what is technically a block and a half away, if we count by intersection. My god-grandparents would be in a similar situation, but they're able to drive, so they can do the 20 or so blocks it takes to get to the Asian market. It wasn't always a Lucky's. It used to be an Albertson's, I think. And it was something else before that. That parking space keeps them alive, sure. That's about it. No one goes there unless they have to. (And if I'd spent the time googling rather than typing up these anecdotes, maybe I would have found some damn numbers.)

sliverstorm 13y ago

If the parking lot is not full, how do you figure?

saraid216 13y ago
If the parking lot is not full, you're getting even fewer customers, because you're losing out on even the choked trickle that comes from cars. You don't want it to be completely full: churn needs to happen. But at less than, (out of my ass), 80% and you have space being taken up by a potential car that isn't producing any value for you. This isn't different from a warehouse for your inventory. You don't want it to be full; in an ideal situation, the size of your warehouse is the amount that you sell over X period of time. If you have inventory sitting there, it's not being sold. Similarly, if you have parking spaces not being used, it's not making you money.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Err... questions of optimal parking lot utilization does not explain why cars reduce the number of visitors you get.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    I explained that in the comment you responded to. You're the one who brought up parking lot utilization.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      Maybe I'm just being dense right now, but you said: Cars [...] actually decreases the number of customers who can get to your store. I don't see how the comment I replied to proves/explains that statement.
      - saraid216 13y ago
        > You can take a fully-packed car and compare the space used to people on a sidewalk: that's the difference in customers you're losing out on. Fully-packed car. That's 4 to 6 people. A parking space is about 153 square feet in size. [1] A single person takes up about 7 to 10 square feet to be comfortable. [2] (Fair cop: I'm not making any measurements here.) That's 9 people you're failing to serve by providing a parking space. That's assuming everything is ideal for the car: that it's filled with 6 people, that every parking space is being used by a car filled with 6 people. (I would guesstimate the average car occupancy is 2.5ish.) Let's further assume my math is crap and the numbers are non-ideal and round it down to 5. (Yes, I just chopped off 50% from the size of my claim.) That's still a ~50% loss. That's the back-of-the-napkin math. In reality, it's more complicated. It asks what you replace the parking space with. It asks what the sidewalk capacity actually is and whether or not that would change if you replaced the parking space with (blank). It asks what the layout of the entire city is and how the public transportation system is and how the city helps inform its residents of your establishment. It asks how happy a customer is when they walk in your store and whether or not that changes the tone of your business. But these are questions that can't be addressed by "cars = customers" anyways. As I explain elsewhere on the thread, designing for cars naturally discourages other forms of traffic. That's a complicate claim and is explored across many, many books on urban design. So we simplify. If the original claim is that a car represents a customer, then my challenge is to look at the space taken up by a car and see what you lose as a result. The easiest number to get is this: 5 customers, ideally. [1] http://www.timhaahs.com/index.php/site/dbdetail/1_what_is_the_appropriate_size_for_a_parking_space/ http://www.timhaahs.com/index.php/site/dbdetail/1_what_is_th... [2] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_square_feet_does_a_person_take_up_standing_up http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_square_feet_does_a_person...