Parking Lot Design

The purpose of parking lot design is to provide safe, efficient vehicle flow to parking stalls. This step is critical to ensuring your customers visit to your commercial building, industrial warehouse, shopping mall, strip shopping center or pad site as inviting, stress-free and enjoyable as possible, while maximizing your ROI. Often, customers will decide to continue patronizing shopping centers, in part, due to how easy and stress-free it was to park.  

Efficient and cost-effective parking lot design must take into account the largest vehicles it will reasonably encounter in each parking area or parking zone. Industrial properties have to accommodate heavy trucks with greater width and length dimensions than regular passenger vehicles, which naturally require larger parking stalls. 

Commercial and Retail will tend to have a mix of vehicle traffic in different zones. Loading docks and semi-trailer parking will require much wider and longer spaces, whereas Employee and customer parking areas will need to accommodate standard sized spaces for passenger vehicles.

Many localities and counties in Virginia have established certain standards and requirements for parking lots, as has the Virginia Department of Transportation.  All applicable sections of these state and local requirements should be followed. Many developers hire an architect or professional engineer to develop aesthetically pleasing designs, but they must all meet the standards as codified by VDOT, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and other applicable regulations.

Here are the zoning standards for Fairfax County VA, as an example:

https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/planning-development/sites/planning-development/files/assets/documents/zoning/zoning%20ordinance/art11.pdf

 Generally speaking, optimal parking lot layout design incorporates the following:

• Prioritize for Handicap ADA-Compliant dimensions and access first
• Account for pedestrian cross-walk hash boxes which are adjacent or tangent to sidewalks
• Use rectangular areas
• Design long sides of parking areas parallel
• Make use of perimeter areas for parking spaces
• Wherever possible, optimize lot square footage by designing traffic lanes access two rows of spaces