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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...
- saraid216 13y ago
  I just realized that I misunderstood your question. On the off chance that you still care and you'll read this, I'll fix that. When I said "fully-packed car", the implication was that the car would arrive and use up a parking lot space. The parking lot space has to be provided in order for the car to use it up. If the space is being used in order to provide a space for a car to park in it, then the same space cannot be used for something else.

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...
saraid216 13y ago
I just realized that I misunderstood your question. On the off chance that you still care and you'll read this, I'll fix that. When I said "fully-packed car", the implication was that the car would arrive and use up a parking lot space. The parking lot space has to be provided in order for the car to use it up. If the space is being used in order to provide a space for a car to park in it, then the same space cannot be used for something else.