Parking Lots

Possible Design Problems Potential Troublespots What You Can Do Natural Surveillance Lighting Access Control Signs More Resources

First impressions count. For most customers, the parking lot or parkade is their first encounter with a mall or shopping center. Does it give a friendly, safe and secure impression, or one that is foreboding, dangerous and dark? Most local ordinances and building codes for malls require that there be 1.5 square feet of parking space for every 1 foot of rentable retail space. Considering the size of many modern malls, parking lots can obviously be quite large spaces. Yet while a mall can have 10,000 people strolling through it and shopping at one point of time, there are rarely more than 5% of that number strolling the parking lot. Thus, this huge space ends up being very empty and unmonitored. This lack of pedestrian traffic, paired with bad design, can be perfect recipe for crime, especially in the case of underground or level parking. Click on the links on the left for more information about preventing crime in parking lots.