Exposing the Black Friday Parking Myth

Image credit: Strong Towns

Image credit: Strong Towns

by James A. Bacon

The Strong Towns blog has published a brilliant piece of crowd-sourced content on the topic of Black Friday parking.

Here’s the issue: Smart Growth advocates are highly critical of local government regulations that mandate a minimum number of parking spaces around retail establishments. The resulting expanses of parking lots, they say, push buildings farther apart and create pedestrian-hostile settings. The ultimate irony, they add, is that most of the parking goes unused.

Defenders of Business As Usual say, true, the spaces may be empty most of the year, but they are needed for peak holiday traffic. They fill up on Black Friday. God forbid that shoppers endure two or three days out of the year where they have difficulty finding parking. God forbid that they conduct their shopping a few days earlier or later.

Chuch Marohn at Strong Towns decided to test the proposition that parking lots fill up on Black Friday. He sent out the word on his blog to readers around the country to take photos of malls and shopping centers in their communities on that most unholy of days. Some 70 photographs, which you can view in a slide show, highlight one empty retail parking lot after another. So much for the Black Friday myth.

Who supports parking minimums? Big retailers like Wal-Mart. Writes Marohn: “Do you think Wal-Mart opposes parking minimums? They may on an individual site here or there, but in general, parking minimums are one of their best advantages. They simultaneously raise the cost of entry for competitors while further tilting the marketplace in favor of businesses catering to people who drive (a segment Wal-Mart dominates).”

Amazon, Fed-Ex and drones… But there’s one retail category that Wal-Mart does not dominate — online retailing. IBM Digital Analytics asserts that 2013 Cyber Monday sales were on track to rise 21.4% from last year, reports Yahoo! News. Seems like demand for Fed-Ex and UPS delivery trucks is up, demand for mall parking lots is down. And you ain’t seen nothing yet. Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos told the “60 Minutes” news show that his company is exploring the delivery of light-weight packages by octocopter drones. Assuming he can get Federal Aviation Administration approval, says the Associated Pressthe service could become functional within four to five years.

Parking regulations are one of the most destructive land use policies ever devised. With the rise of online shopping, they are rapidly losing whatever usefulness they ever had. It’s time to get rid of them.