Parking areas are just as important as the structures they are built for, as without them, people have a difficult time entering those buildings. They might spend a frustratingly large amount of time looking for a nearby space, or they may end up going elsewhere if they can’t find anywhere to securely leave their vehicles. As a result, local governments frequently enact certain guidelines to ensure that buildings have enough parking space available. Commercial parking ratio requirements is one of these guidelines, and it calls for parking ratio calculation. We’ll explain what parking ratio is and how to calculate parking requirements and ratios for commercial buildings.
What Is Parking Ratio?
When figuring out how to calculate parking requirements, remember that the parking ratio is a numerical figure you can use to compare the size of a building to the amount of parking space that it should have. For the building, you use units of square feet, while you use the number of useable spaces as units for the parking area. Different ratio minimums exist for different types of buildings. A factory where only workers need parking might have a low number of spots required. In contrast, a large shopping center that must accommodate many employees and visitors will need more spots, even if it has the same square footage as the factory.
How To Do a Standard Calculation
Now, let’s get into how to calculate the parking ratio for commercial buildings with a parking formula. Start by dividing the number of total square feet by one thousand. You must do this because the final ratio is expressed as the number of parking spaces per one thousand square feet. After this, divide the number of parking spots you have or plan to construct by the resulting square feet number you obtained in the first step. This is your parking ratio, arrived at through the car parking space calculator.
Here’s an example to further clarify this parking ratio calculation process. Say you have a commercial building with 20,000 ft2 of total space. You divide 20,000 by 1,000 to get 20. Then you take the number of parking spaces, which we’ll set to 40 for the sake of this illustration, and divide this by 20. In the end, your parking ratio is 2, or two parking spaces per every one thousand square feet.
That’s how to calculate commercial parking requirements. If you find that you need to provide more parking spaces for your commercial building, consider using a semi-automated parking system to bolster your existing parking garage. With its moving platforms, you can fit spaces above the ground in the underutilized vertical space between where grounded parked cars normally sit and the ceiling. Harding Steel also has semi-automated parking systems that place vehicles below ground as well. Contact Harding Steel for more information.