On the other hand, I know of a few retail business that are well aware of this perception problem, and when they build a store they build many more parking spaces than they require. This is done so that when people drive up there always appears to be plenty of parking. That is, “close to the store” is always a relative thing. A space far away can seem close if the lot itself extends out some seemingly infinite distance.

And a good bit of transportation research in the U.S. was funded by automobile manufacturers. That means that if the problem is congestion, the question being asked might be how do we move more cars more efficiently, not how do we get people to drive less. That bias eventually filters it’s way down to local ordinances and we end up with things like huge parking lots.

ITS stands for Intelligent Traffic System (or Signals, depending on the usage).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_transportation_system

I personally would rather park in a garage than on a surface street. I try to go to the uppermost stories where I am almost guaranteed a space and I leave my car there opposed to driving to my next destination. I remember during my senior year (’07-’08) at Penn State the Borough of State College, PA was in the process of implementing a system of VMS signs throughout the downtown alerting motorists of where garages were and how many spaces were available. When I returned for a visit last spring I was happy to see it installed and working beautifully.

I compare this to the situation in the city near where I grew up, Wilkes-Barre, PA. The city has plenty of parking spaces but only a few garages are utilized to their fullest potential. I’ve unknowingly entered one garage on an occasion only to go through the whole facility without finding one space. A “full” sign would have been too nice of the city to put in front of the entrance. In addition, I wasn’t the only sucker to enter the garage. All in all it took me over an hour and a half to make it to the top and back out, utterly ridiculous.

As a transportation planner I believe more American cities should implement systems that our friends in the UK and Europe have been spoiled with for years now. Also, we wouldn’t have this problem if transit in this country was better and more abundant.

In the UK and Europe, this simply does not apply. For some reason, Europeans and Brits are not the whiney, entitled, lazy fools that Americans evidently are - they are willing to “walk” from their cars to stores, they are willing to drive up to the second (or third, fourth, etc.) level of a parking garage to find a spot, and so on.

It surely helps that parking garages here indicate the number of available spaces - and that there are frequently signs at major traffic points indicating how many spaces are available at which parking garages in the center city area, pointing you towards them as well, so you avoid futile hunting in a full garage.

Perhaps Europeans and Brits are just used to this extra information or used to dealing with more crowded city centers, more used to relying on centralized planning for their parking and many other things.

Or perhaps Americans are just a race of lazy idiots, and even providing additional parking information will do nothing to disabuse them of the bred-in notion that they deserve a parking spot directly in front of the Hamburger Gulper outlet they want to visit, and that if there is no such spot then there is “no parking” and more, more more and bigger spaces must be built for them immediately.

Thanks.