The Parking Con

Ever drive into a Target, Home Depot or other big store's parking lot and have to park a long way from the entrance? That's because you're doing it wrong.


Take a careful look at this image from Google Earth of a parking lot in Phoenix, AZ:
See how the center parking column below the asterisk is filled with cars while the columns to the left (and a couple to the right) are relatively very empty? If you look at the density of vehicles, it kinda looks like a bell curve, doesn't it?

(I had a picture of a nice curve sitting around.)

Assuming every driver wants to get closer to the store's entrance/exit, the drivers of the cars parked around the number 1 in this picture would have been a lot better off parking around 2 or 3. Notice all the empty spaces there:
See the asterisk at the top of the circle? That's the vehicle located furthest from the entrance in the center column. In all the pictures in this post, the white circle represents all the points in the parking lot that are the same distance from the entrance as that vehicle.

In the images in this post, for the most part, the edge of the white circle is placed at the first available empty spot of a series of empty spots in the center parking column in front of the entrance (you can verify this in the picture above). Basically, if you can find an empty spot or spots within the circle, they're closer to the entrance (since the circle(s) are centered on the entrance.) If people parked in parking lots only concerned about getting closest to the entrance, each car on the circle's borders would be equidistant from the center, like this:
Pretty obvious stuff, right?

Here are the important questions:

- How common is it for drivers to park a great distance away from the entrance of a store just to be in the center column (the column directly in front of the entrance), specifically when there are empty spaces much, much closer to the entrance?

- If there really is an "imbalance" in the way people park, wouldn't people start to notice or care about it?

- When people drive into parking lots, do you think they try to consciously be in front of/in line with the entrance, or are they trying to minimize their walking distance (get closest to the entrance)?


If you search Google Earth for big stores, shopping centers or other places with large parking lots (I recommend looking for Home Depots), you'll see people's parking behavior for yourself. Fortunately, I've done this work for you so you don't have to spend hours trying to figure out the errors in your parking ways. Have some examples:
Look at the top of the center column. The drivers of the cars at the edge of the white circle (#1 in the next image) could have parked one, two or three columns to the left or the right and been much closer to the entrance (and the exit, since this one's a Target) The optimal parking distance is represented by the light blue circle, the distance at which the first series of open parking spaces is from the entrance (#2 in the next image). Here's a better graphic:
Clearly people would have parked closer to the entrance if they would have avoided the center column.

In this example, every other column except for the center had available spaces closer to the entrance:
I was even very generous with the blue circle in this one. Notice that the first series of available parking spaces was, at most, about a fourth of the distance from the entrance as the top cars in the center column. All the drivers who parked at the top of the lot had to do was choose any column but the center one and they'd have been better off.

Have another:
The distance differential isn't quite as exaggerated in this image as it was the last few, but the point remains.

So why is it, then, that people
A) prefer the center column over the others even with some [inconspicuous] cost,
B) don't notice the empty spots while driving and
C) don't recognize the overall pattern?

Apparently it's tough. It's hard to tell which column has the spaces closest to where you want to be, and I suppose it's some version of common sense that the center columns would have the majority of the closest spaces. The only way to see it, it seems, is to look at a lot of parking lots from above (Google Earth style).

There are, I'm sure, a plethora of other reasons why bell curve parking occurs so commonly (search Google Earth, or maps.google.com, and figure 'em out yourself, I dare ya), but that's not really the point of this post. No, the point of this post is to spread the secrets of how to find optimal parking, and to teach you how to exploit the strange behavior of your fellow man.

That's right 4EConners, I'm converting my hours of wasted time looking at and diagramming parking lots into future time saved by you. If you just follow these very basic rules for parking, you'll be able to [hopefully] recoup the time you wasted reading this post (over the next 40 years or so...) by spending less time walking in and out of stores, shopping malls and maybe even the place you work:

Rule #1 - Center Column Overflow:
If the center column - directly in front of the entrance - is packed to the limit (see the second parking lot image, above) with cars, the overflow will be taken up by the columns flanking the center. This means you'll have to start your search for the closest space at least two columns away from the center column, if not more. In fact, the busier the store, the further to the left or right you'll have to look.

Rule #2 - Center Column Space Available:
If the center column still has spaces available at it's "top" (furthest away from the entrance), start your search for the perfect space in the columns immediately to the left or right of the center one. You'll most likely find better spaces in these two columns than you would elsewhere.

Rule #3 - The Generalization:
Depending on how busy the store/parking lot is, the general rule (which can, in theory, override rules 1 and 2) is that the closest parking to the entrance will be about 20 to 60 degrees away from a line parallel to the store front. If the store is busy, start your parking space search at about 20 degrees up from the store-front line and look for spaces driving away from the center column. If the store is slow, though, start at the top of the lot and look down to around 60 degrees from the store-front line. This should be even easier to see since the parking lot is not as busy.

These rules will be harder or easier to follow depending on which way you enter a parking lot. A good way to simplify the whole process, though, is the even easier-to-understand Foreecon Fourth Rule of Parking:

Rule #4 - Sign Readability Rule of Thumb:
If the store/parking lot is clearly busy, you should be parking where you can't read the sign due to the angle your car is parked from the store, i.e. relatively far off to one side.
If the store/lot is clearly not busy, you should be parking slightly off-center from the front of the store, where you can read the sign but not head-on.

Easy enough, right?


And for kicks, here are some non-traditional parking lots:
Notice the stack of cars, stacked up even through multiple different rows, perpendicular to the walkway entrance (the center of the blue circle). Again, using Rule #3, you can see there is available parking closer to the entrance about 20 or 30 degrees from the imaginary entrance line (in this case, the line perpendicular to the sidewalk that crosses the street.)

Finally, a complex one. In this example, if you click on it & look closely you'll see that the parking lot is packed with people attending a small carnival-type-thingy and/or going to the mall (the mall entrance is right behind the carnival). You'll notice that the drivers really wanted to get close to that one center of activity, and that there's a big drop-off all at once (at one of the parking columns on the left side.) Of all the examples I gathered, this one looks most like a normal distribution curve (including the cars parked all the way at the top of the image):
If it's not obvious already, following Rule #3 would have saved the people who parked at 1 or even 2 in the image a bunch of time by parking at the 20 or 30 degree line from the entrance/store front (3). But how does one know while driving in the parking lot? Easy - the great thing about finding parking at the ~20 degree line is that you can pretty easily see any open spaces from the road closest to the store front. Basically, If you can see that the parking lot is pretty full, all you have to do is follow the store front road until you find a space; Rule #3 dictates that you'll end up parking closer to the entrance than you would if you tried to find spaces by driving up and down each of the columns.


So, even though some parking lots are very non-standard, and the rules will be either more or less applicable depending on the time of day, the general rules of parking will apply in some form or another wherever you go. You might not always get the best deal by following the rules (and maybe you need the exercise, too), but I'd be willing to bet that reading and following the Foreecon Rules of Parking (trademark pending) will mostly help you achieve the parking glory you've always searched for.

And one more thing: If drivers suddenly became aware of their behavior, they'd all start filling up the empty parking spaces and making this entire "study" invalid, right? All this parking strategy, then, will be our little secret OK? Enjoy your new ability to park.