Parking Stall Lines, One or Two?

I recently read a very interesting article about whether or not parking stalls should be striped with single lines or double lines. The article was written by a parking consultant in Colorado so all of the data is based on a survey done strictly in selected Colorado cities. However, I think the findings are worth passing along.

Many parking locations that I have come in contact with around the country have used double lines for parking stall striping. In almost all of those cases, the owners or managers of those parking facilities were adamant in their belief that it helped to center cars within their respective stalls, that it provided the maximum space between parked vehicles and, cut down or eliminated door dings. Intuition tells you that all of that makes sense. However, since double striping the lines between parking stalls costs over twice as much as traditional single line striping, this survey was taken to see if in fact it has a positive impact on how people park their cars.

The survey was taken in 25 garages in Colorado and covered a wide array of users including office use, mixed-use, residential, health care facilities, municipal, shopping centers and others. According to the survey data, some interesting conclusions were drawn.

Single-line striping was preferred over double-line striping 72% vs. 28%.
90 degree parking spaces were preferred over angled spaces 61% vs. 39%.
7.6% of cars were parked improperly.
Parkers seem to pay little or no attention to signs or striping that designates a space for compact or small-car-only; they found a space and they parked in it.

I am not ready to pronounce double-line stall striping dead but at the very least, this cluster of data sparks my interest. Our local environment is predominantly urban core office use and our demographics in Little Rock would be somewhat different from those in the Colorado cities but I am going to investigate this issue in greater detail.

With that in mind, if you happen to see Jeff or me walking through your garage with a clipboard and a measuring wheel, we’ll just be exploring this parking stall line-striping issue!