pf_03192 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

Christmas Crush Is On - For Presents and Parking: Lots Are Not Designed for the Busiest Days San Diego (CA) Union Tribune December 21,2002 Michael Stetz Here's a holiday parking tip: Hit malls bright and early, as stores open, to avoid the horde of shoppers later in the day. Here's another tip: Do this in July. OK, maybe that's impractical, given that it's the last weekend before Christmas and you're wondering how you're going to finish when you can't even get within two miles of the mall. It's not your imagination, by the way. There is a growing holiday crush in some key retail hubs, such as Mission Valley, where so many shopping centers and Santas beckon. "We have definitely recognized an increase in the number of shoppers, both during the year and during the holiday season," said Bob Doherty, general manager of the Fashion Valley shopping center in Mission Valley. While holiday spending has been reported to be weak this year because of the struggling economy, you'd be hard-pressed to find proof by looking at mall traffic and mall parking lots. Part of the problem is that infrastructure is not designed to handle the worst-case scenario, notes Gary Halbert, chief deputy planner for the San Diego Planning Department. "You don't want to over-pave just to handle the amount of traffic that comes a couple times of year." Halbert got stuck in traffic near Fashion V alley the other night, he said. It took him 45 minutes to go less than a mile. Some of this can be blamed on "shopper anxiety," he said. Shoppers do ill-advised things, such as move their cars into intersection centers even after lights change. Doherty, of Fashion Valley, couldn't give specific numbers of shoppers the mall sees during the holiday season because of industry competition. Here's what he could say: Fashion Valley has 7,668 parking spaces. And it seems that at this time of year, that number of parking places would be needed just to accommodate the people in line at the mall's Starbucks. 1