First, let me begin with a confession: I have a great dislike of parking garages. I don't like driving around in circles to reach a spot and I especially despise sitting behind some knucklehead hoping to secure a spot on a lower floor of a garage when everyone and their mother knows the only spaces are going to be on the roof.
Among my least favorite: the garages on 2nd and 4th Streets on either side of the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. They are classically flawed because you have to wait in a single file line to reach the spaces. The Westside Pavilion is also pretty awful because it's confusing and claustrophobic. Great if you have a Shriner's mini-car, bad if you don't.
If I had to pick one garage that I liked, it would be the one at the ArcLight movie theaters in Hollywood. Instead of having to drive to every floor, you drive up a big ramp and parking attendants usually use cones to block off the floors where there are no spaces. There's still some waiting involved -- I was behind a dude the other night who just decided to stop mid-ramp to gain his bearings (a sin worthy of jail time in my view) -- but it's better than most.
All this is a long way of saying I was struck by the recent news that the Westfield mall at Century City had ginned up a new advanced parking system. I actually visited a few weeks ago to check it out, and the folks I talked to in the parking lot seemed to like it.
In this case, the garage is a massive two-story affair with well over 2,000 spaces and a miniature street grid running through it. This being the Westside, the traffic on the streets carries over into the garage and it's not much fun when the mall is busy. Although there is mass transit available, I suspect the lady going to the Louis Vuitton store isn't arriving on the Rapid Bus.
Westfield's solution was to put a light bulb over every single space that shows whether it's occupied or not. The net effect for the motorist is if you're gazing down an aisle of cars and you see green, that means there are spaces. If it's all red, then keep moving. Blue indicates handicapped parking.
The mall also installed big lighted signs that motorists encounter soon after entering the garage. Those signs are intended to show which of the quadrants has open spaces. The idea was good, but as Zach Behrens over at LAist noted last month, there's just enough visual distraction there that motorists may very well run the stop sign while trying to decode the electronic toteboard (shown above).
The Westfield folks say they continue to receive grateful email from regular shoppers, so I'm curious what the wider public's views are. The lights, as far as I can tell, do seem to help, but I'm not sure they mitigate the fact that there are still 2,000-plus cars in the garage.
It's also worth pointing out that Westfield is proposing a massive expansion of the mall at Century City, so it's in their best interest to do anything that is PR friendly and appears to be a traffic-busting move. Westfield also knows how to play politics: In 2006, they gave $100,000 to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's effort to take over the LAUSD, and also spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to thwart Rick Caruso's effort to build a mall at Santa Anita racetrack, which happens to be located next to a giant mall that Westfield operates.
One final thing: While at the Century City mall, I went upstairs to its fancy food court and for the mere price of $17 had a small prime rib sandwich, potato chips and Diet Coke from the Lawry's booth. Tasty, but about twice the price it should be.
Your thoughts, anyone?
-- Steve Hymon
