54 Parking Spaces for 7/11

From Correspondent Mark, A Shoupista nightmare:

Don’t know that I’ve EVER seen minimum requirements that even come close to these:

“Under the law restaurant, bars, and night clubs are required to have one parking space for each 100 square feet of customer floor area while other businesses are required to have one for every 50 square feet.”

This means a restaurant, bar or club needs to have 10 parking spaces per thousand sq ft and all other businesses need 20 per thousand.  If I were to open a 800 sq ft “boutique” (20’x40′) I’d have to provide 16 parking spaces, even though it’s highly doubtful I would actually have room for 16 people in my store all at the same time unless I had no merchandise in there. A 2700 sq ft mini-mart (typical size) would need to provide 54 spaces, and I can’t imagine being able to sell enough slurpee’s to offset that cost.

If you assume a typical parking space is approx 9’x19′, then for every 100 sq ft of dining area there will be 171 sq ft of parking and for every 100 sq ft of retail there will be 342 sq ft of parking.  If that space is all on-street then your looking at over 90 feet of curb for every 100 sq ft of dining area and 180 feet of curb for 100 sq ft of retail, or 1 mile per 6,000 sq ft of dining or 3,000 sq ft of retail.  If the space is provided off-street  and you need to include drive lanes, etc then your looking at approx a half acre (+/-) of parking for every 6,000 sq ft of dining area or 3,000 sq ft of retail.  That’s a ratio (parking sq ft vs commercial sq ft) of nearly 4 to 1 for dining and 8 to 1 for retail.

Sometimes you just have to shake your head and move on.

Mark Rimmer