Poorly designed parking areas are a public safety risk. We know how to fix them. 

In the seconds before a devastating accident, Mr. Garcia was sipping his morning coffee just outside the entrance to a 7-Eleven. A driver pulled into a perpendicular parking spot facing the store. Attempting to stop, they mistakenly hit the gas and slammed their car into Mr. Garcia, pinning him against a wall and crushing both of his legs, which later had to be amputated.

Mr. Garcia had no idea he was standing in a statistically dangerous place; on average, a car crashes into a 7-Eleven storefront 1.3 times every single day.

This tragic incident made headlines when Mr. Garcia was awarded $91 million, the largest pre-trial settlement in Illinois history. This amount was an outlier—but the incident was not.

Commercial parking lots and garages present a public health risk that is often ignored until tragedy strikes. Here at Parking Design Group, we’re intimately aware of the terrible accidents that occur every day in parking lots and storefronts across the United States. But we typically aren’t contacted until it’s too late.

The good news is that many of these accidents are preventable. Building owners and managers can implement simple safety measures that protect pedestrians and their businesses.

As parking lot accidents increase in frequency and severity, this is an urgent matter for all property owners to address.

Why are parking areas so dangerous?

When there’s a liquid spill inside, businesses clean it up so no one slips. They cordon off aisles and place warning signs and barriers. Owners are acutely aware of liability as it relates to the interior of their businesses. But for some reason, that awareness often stops at the front door. Parking lots remain the wild west of many commercial establishments.

Parking lots and retail storefronts can be stressful, sometimes confusing places where cars and pedestrians move in close proximity. Without intentional designs and proper safety measures, they can become dangerous places.

Recent figures from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) report that approximately 28,000 persons are injured by vehicles in “not in traffic” accidents every year in the United States. This includes crashes in private property parking lots and public areas that are not considered streets or highways.  Hundreds are killed – many as a result of poor design or unsafe management practices by owners who rely on untrained contractors or vendors to help them operate their parking lots and storefronts.

Despite these statistics—which should ring alarm bells and inspire action—the issue is worsening.

Many businesses introduced new traffic patterns and parking lot uses during the height of COVID-19, when customers were opting for curbside pickup and outdoor dining. The risks were largely disregarded, and pedestrians paid the price. While some businesses have slowly implemented more safety measures to accommodate these changes, others have left them as is, choosing to gamble on safety and the future of their businesses.

SUVs and trucks are also getting bigger and more dangerous, adding to the risk of parking lot accidents. In the last 30 years, the U.S. passenger vehicle has gotten 8 inches taller.

Full-size pickups and many models of SUVs are proving especially dangerous to children; many models have a huge blind spot at the front of the vehicle, and drivers can easily miss a small child crossing their path.

Pedestrian deaths recently hit their highest level in 40 years, and this trend extends to parking lots where vehicles are navigating crowded and confusing lanes of traffic right next to people, and often at speeds higher than was the norm before COVID lockdowns.

In 2022, I served as a consultant on a devastating case in which a toddler in Tacoma was struck by a driver in the parking lot of the apartment building where his family lived. The driver could not see the small child who came running out the front door and into the lot. After reviewing the evidence and images of the parking lot design, I offered my opinion that the defendant in this case, the property owner, was negligent in the parking lot design and lacked safety measures to protect pedestrians from traffic.

These cases are devastating—especially when we know exactly how to prevent them.

How do we make parking areas safer?

In the case of the Tacoma apartment lot accident, speed humps, a convex mirror, and pedestrian fencing could have saved a toddler’s life.

In most retail parking lots, faster, bigger vehicles are having an impact on safety.  The increasing number of drivers on medications and the increasing number of drivers over 70 also contribute to the rise in parking lot and storefront crashes.

At sidewalks and curbs where there is nose-in or perpendicular parking, a simple bollard (a vertical steel post) could have saved Mr. Garcia’s legs. It costs as little as $1000 per parking space to keep pedestrians and store employees safe. Had a parking design expert been consulted on the 7-Eleven parking lot, they might have recommended changes to the parking space alignments or alteration of traffic flow or suggested the installation of bollards.  The small cost of these corrections is insignificant compared to the very high cost of settlement.

Instead, 7-Eleven chose to skip this safety measure—a decision that cost them $91 million.

As a property owner, it is your responsibility to keep everyone on-site safe, and you want to protect your business from the risk of damage from vehicles and ruinous liability. Parking lots are an extension of your business, and they must be treated as such.

Parking facility experts, like our own team at Parking Design Group, are dedicated to the design and implementation of safe parking lots and structures. We understand the ins and outs of parking lot design with the same level of expertise as an electrician who knows how to safely wire a home. You wouldn’t wire an apartment building without the help of a licensed electrician, and you shouldn’t lay out a parking lot—or take ownership of one that’s poorly designed—without consulting a parking lot expert.

It is our profound hope that more property owners will be proactive in parking lot safety, allowing us to do our jobs and implement safe parking lots and structures that will ultimately save limbs and lives.