Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Lack of theatre parking

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Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 03-12-2004, 03:45 PM:

My favorite movie theatre in Honolulu is Pacific's Ward 16 but they are located in a very popular mall and finding a parking space there many times is next to impossible. Right next to the Ward Theatres at the Victoria Ward Centre is a Dave & Busters establishment and a Bose Store is downstairs along with a lot of wonderful places to get something to eat and other trendy shops making the mall a very popular place for young people. My original favorite theatres were the Waikiki Twins before they closed and finding free parking on the streets was also difficult to find so I had to subject myself to first pay $6.00 at the theatre parking structure and get $2.00 credited to my theatre admission. Because I use Honolulu's bus system a lot lately, parking is not a problem but it is when I take friends to see a movie and taking a bus is out of the question. I stated in another post the other day my preference for the Dole Cannery 18 operated by Signature Theatres because it was convinient due to an abundance of covered free parking there. The Dole theatres are not bad but their THX sound system leaves a lot to be desired. Parking was not too bad when the Ward first opened but the theatres have become very popular and I only go there for special pictures that has a great soundtract and visuals.

How many of you who operate or work for popular theatres have the same problem as the Ward and what have you done? I actually do not think there is anything that can be done with a parking problem like the Ward Theatres but I just thought I would ask.

-Claude

Posted by Aaron Mehocic (Member # 15) on 03-12-2004, 05:36 PM:

I've never worked in any business where employees or customers were required to park on the street. With that being said, however, the theatre I work for has had parking lot trouble a few years back when an off-track betting facility located in the storefront immediately beside us. We had a very hard time keeping their cars out of our spots. Business suffered hard as well since many people from this town traveled to surrounding cities and much newer multiplexes. Our solution was to add on additional auditoriums and purchased a grassy lot for more parking. Understandably we could do this because of our location in the suburbs. Getting back to your original point, though, it does suck trying to find a spot to park both as an employee and a customer when a theatre is located in a high growth / high activity area. The real hassle was trying to explain to our neighbor's customers that they couldn't park in our spots or they might be towed. I've had 75 year old women cuss at me with more filthier mouths than 15 year old high school freshmen because of parking woes.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 03-12-2004, 06:57 PM:

My theatre is located on "Main Street" and thus we have no parking lot. The building has 5 spaces directly in front of it, which are always filled by the drunks from the bar next door.

But, there are two stores across the street (a Napa and a grocery store) with plenty of parking, so it's not bad.
'
What's funny to me is, people occasionally bitch about having to walk across the street for the theatre, but they have no problem going to Wal Mart and parking on the other end of their behemoth parking lot. Go figure.

Posted by Brian Michael Weidemann (Member # 2243) on 03-13-2004, 01:38 AM:

The Irvine Spectrum complex is a huge outdoor mall, basically, with plenty of restaurant/bars of the Yard House/Dave & Busters type. Since the Edwards 21 opened up in 1995, I can remember the parking situation there has always been bad, Friday/Saturday nights. And not just bad, but putrid, rotten, stinky, and rank.

It's all open lot surrounding most of the complex, extending up to the two freeways which cross. Over the years, they kept adding on to the Spectrum, building over existing lot. There's nowhere to build more parking lot, so the parking got less as the reasons to be there got more. They're only NOW building a parking structure, of two eventually to be built. But see, they sectioned off the part of the current lot to do it, making parking even worse.

As for employees, everyone in the Spectrum must park in a specially designated section, in the far corner of the lot, where the freeways cross, or (thankfully) in a newly designated off-site lot. Sure there are free-shuttle services, but it's mostly quicker just to foot it and wait at the crosswalks. On weekends, nobody can park in the corner lot (which pointlessly remains empty); we ALL must stuff ourselves in the off-site one.

If employees' vehicles are caught in the main, public parking area (there are records kept and "Security" on watch!), we'll get towed after two notices, even during the week, when most of the lot is empty ALL DAY! [Roll Eyes]

Posted by Carl Martin (Member # 1146) on 03-13-2004, 02:04 AM:

i sure am glad i work in a downtown theater. we have no lot of our own, but there are 2 within a block's radius. i ride a bike, but there are buses and trains as well. when someone calls for directions, i tell them to get on the train, get off downtown, and walk 2 blocks. if they insist on driving [Roll Eyes]

, i usually have to find someone who knows what the highways around here are called.

i can't imagine being in some sprawled-out suburb, slave to an automobile. yes, slave, as invention truly is the mother of necessity. many necessities, in fact, as the parking-lot woes described above illustrate.

carl

Posted by Pete Naples (Member # 761) on 03-13-2004, 03:27 AM:

It's a bit of a nightmare in central Edinburgh or Glasgow, I've only got one service that has any parking to speak of. The rest is a case of stop car as close as you can, or dare (parking attendants / traffic wardens are vicious!), unload, drive to nearest car park, find it's full, spend an hour driving round to find a space, park, then several hours later do it all again in reverse.

Lately I've taken to doing all central Edinburgh services starting on a monday, take car in on sunday night, unload, then go by bus or train in the morning, only taking the car in on th last day.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 03-13-2004, 07:04 AM:

Car parking was a big problem in both Exeter and York, and in York it's set to get bigger.

At Exeter we had a little car park with about five spaces. With a total seating capacity of around 500 between two screens, you can imagine the mieowing and hissing that generated! What made it worse was that shoppers tended to turn up at the crack of dawn, park up, bugger off and return late in the evening, without even having set foot in the cinema. The fire officer wouldn't let us put a barrier on the entrance because it was needed for fire engine access to other buildings via our car park.

In the end we had to introduce a system whereby genuine cinema customers were given a ticket to put in their windscreen when they booked their cinema seats, and get a firm of clamping Nazis in to terminate with extreme prejudice any vehicles found without one. It was great fun watching the serial offenders being clamped during the first few weeks of the new regime (by that point, word had got out that there was a free car park in the city centre). But boy did it create a lot of admin hassle just for the sake of five poxy parking spaces.

York has no car park whatsoever. To add insult to injury, the City Council (Lib Dem - what a surprise!) are about to massively hike the public car park charges, which are already almost at London levels, and extend the charging period from 6pm to 9pm. There's been an absolute outcry about this (some of it is probably still going on in the York Evening Press), and I fear that it will hit cinema attandance. It will have the effect of adding around £4 to the cost of coming in by car and seeing a film in the 6pm or 8pm slot. And to add insult to injury, the Park and Ride buses finish at 9. In their short-term milk-the-motorist money grabbing crusade (they know that they're going to be Council Tax capped, so they're looking to get money elsewhere) this council really are going to do huge damage to city centre traders: they seem to want a city whose sole evening occupants are binge-drinking teenage yobs who come in by public transport. [Mad]

Darren (if you're reading this) - are you lot worried about this?

Posted by Jack Ondracek (Member # 1466) on 03-13-2004, 09:52 AM:

Our parking is tight sometimes, but not usually a problem. By sheer coincidence, the businesses in our strip-mall all seem to have peak times that don't interfere substantially with each other.

We do ask our staff (including us) not to use the parking directly in front of the theatre... that's about it.

If we have a major problem, it's keeping people out of the handicapped slots. Of all the shops here, ours seems to get the most handicapped patrons. This has made us somewhat obsessive about keeping those slots available, including an occasional tow.

A local deputy stops by now and then to help out. We recently discovered that they can (and do) write tickets for non-placarded vehicles in those spaces (and the unload slots next to them).... $275 bucks! WOW!

Posted by Aaron Mehocic (Member # 15) on 03-13-2004, 11:12 AM:

You know what really burns me about handicap parking are those assholes (mostly employee girlfriend/boyfriends) that will park in the open slots AFTER the last set of shows goes in while waiting for their squeeze to get off the clock. I'm sorry, I don't care if its 3 AM and we've been closed for hours . . . handicap parking means handicap parking!

Posted by Brent Mahaney (Member # 1090) on 03-13-2004, 06:13 PM:

We ran into an interesting parking problem last weekend. Attendence was way up and about 20 of our customers parked a short distance up the road (200 yards) in a bank's parking lot. The bank has recently put up three very small signs that say, "No parking, violators will be towed." So guess what? People got out of their movie at 12:30 in the morning to find that their cars were gone. And guess who got screamed at? We did. In a way, it sort of sucks that something like that happens to your customers. But the bank has every right to do what they want to do with their property. It wasn't a very neighborly thing to do, and it certainly won't help relations between our businesses. But I can see their side of it, I guess...

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 03-13-2004, 06:52 PM:

No-one is going to be visiting a bank at 0030 (unless they've come to do the place over, in which case they're not your customers and you don't need to worry about them). I'd hazard a guess that the bank put up that notice to deter non-customers using their lot as a free car park during the working day, and that they're not really worried about who parks there in the evening. They probably outsourced the towing to a company which makes its money through reclaim fees from the owners of removed cars. So of course the tow-ers are going to be watching the place like a hawk in the evenings, especially if word has got around town that the bank's back yard can be used as a free car park.

Posted by Jack Ondracek (Member # 1466) on 03-13-2004, 09:23 PM:

There's quite a flap about that, over in the Seattle area. Some tow company out of Oregon moved an office up here & has been patrolling area businesses & apartment complexes. The State finally put a stop to "predatory tows", partly because blanket authorizations aren't legal here. The tow company is supposed to have a signed authorization for each individual tow. The tow companies in my area are pretty good about that. Among other things, it prevents the kind of problem like the one at that bank.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 03-14-2004, 10:19 AM:

We were very open and above board about it at Exeter. The clamping company we got in didn't charge us anything, and provided us with notices to stick up all over the car park. These clearly stated that any vehicle parked there without a ticket displayed in the windscreen would be clamped, and the owner charged £25 for release (and it was those fines they made their money from). No-one who was able to read could fail to understand that only cinema staff and customers were allowed to park. The clampers did patrol the place regularly, but if a persistent offender turned up we could ring them and they would come and clamp the bastard.

But as a bank obviously doesn't need its spaces during the evening, I'd seek to do a deal whereby the theatre's customers could use the car park in exchange for (for example), the bank's adverts being shown before certain shows, or something like that.

Posted by Jim Bedford (Member # 4) on 03-14-2004, 12:04 PM:

I've parked The Nugget Theatre, Telluride, CO, in the same place for the last 20 years that it's been parked in since 1935 and never had a problem.

We generally assume that more than 50% of our audience walk to our single screen downtown. Anybody out there have a theatre that most people still walk to?

Posted by John-Layton Jenkins (Member # 2080) on 03-14-2004, 01:51 PM:

Claude,

I was in Hawaii this past summer and I did stop by that Pacific's Ward 16 that you were talking about. The parking was extremely horrible, like maybe a hundred or so spaces that I remember. We had to resort to parking in the handicap space, which was legal because my grandmother was with us and we had the tag. I would expect better parking in such a busy spot, but land is scarce in Hawaii. [Smile]

Posted by Mark Hajducki (Member # 1732) on 03-14-2004, 03:59 PM:

quote:
It's a bit of a nightmare in central Edinburgh or Glasgow, I've only got one service that has any parking to speak of.

In Edinburgh there are four currently open cinemas (+ one recently closed) within the restricted parking zone and none of them offer free or reduced price parking to customers since the local public car parks can charge over £2 per hour. At night (after 6:30) and on Sundays on street parking is free but is not always conveniently avaliable for visiting some of the cinemas.
All four cinemas (mentioned above) have bars (some licenced for in-screen consumption) so traveling by foot will allow customers to make use of these.

Of the cinemas outwith the restricted parking area one provides no parking (except on street), one provides four hours free (usefull for films such as LOTR:ROTK) and the remaining three provide free parking).

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 03-14-2004, 04:05 PM:

Most of the customers at the Avon Cinema in Providence, RI (where I usually fill in once a month or so; pics are in the gallery) arrive on foot from nearby colleges. There is no parking lot (just on-street parking), so this is a good thing.

Posted by Michael Gonzalez (Member # 593) on 03-16-2004, 09:41 PM:

One thing worth noting about bank parking at night. A lot of banks have 24 hour ATM machines adjacent to their parking lots and customers tend to get nervous at night when there are parked cars nearby even if they "appear" to be empty (you never know...).

Posted by Tony Ratcliff (Member # 1196) on 03-18-2004, 11:36 AM:

My theatre, the Ohio here in Madison, Indiana, is in the middle of the block on Main Street. We have no parking of our own.

Occasionally we get complaints about parking from actual customers.

But the biggest issue is trying to book groups in. The most often used excuse for the multiplex in town getting the group versus us is parking. But it is a psychological thing. There is plenty of parking within a 2 block radius of us.
But for some reason, people think the distance from the back of the parking lot at the 6-plex is shorter than walking one block to my theatre.
And like another person said, these people have NO PROBLEM walking 1/2 a mile at the mall or even at Wal-Mart!!!

Posted by Gary Crawford (Member # 2038) on 03-18-2004, 12:19 PM:

My place, Beach Cinema in Bradley Beach NJ is also a Main Street theater. Difficult but not impossible to find a space nearby, but summer can be a nightmare sometimes (we are right in the middle of the Jersey Shore tourism area) There are restaurants up and down Main St here and things do get busy. We also have a bus stop within 50 feet of the doors, and a train station 4 blocks away. A lot of our patrons are right here from town and they walk.

We share a small parking lot with a restaurant on the opposite corner that holds maybe 35 cars. That fills up quick.

When my mother still lived about 3 blocks away sometimes I would park at her house and walk or ride a bike to work. She sold her house a year and a half ago so I don't have that option now.

Most people seem to accept the parking situation here and complaints are minimal. If they get here early (6:00 latest) and have supper at one of the many eateries nearby they can get a spot easily. By the second show most of the diners have gone and lots of on-street and lot spaces are open. Sure it could be better but we are stuck in a town originally designed for horse-and-buggy and trolleys and train service. They didn't think of parking problems in the 1890s.