Dear Captains of Industry:

It seems like such a little thing, but one of my pet peeves is crappy parking lot design. I never really paid much attention to it until Patrick and I moved to Long Beach and started visiting the Long Beach Town Center.

For those of you who don't live in Long Beach or have no reason to visit, the Town Center (and it might be Towne Center, but fuck that extraneous e) is an outdoor mall located on Carson Blvd., just off the 605 freeway. I'm not a big fan of outside malls unless they have underground or a separate parking structure. Sure, being outside is nice but I don't want to play a game of Frogger every time I decide to go to another store. It's one of those malls where you park your car, and then walk through the parking lot to get to whichever store you're visiting. I mean, that sounds like every mall, no? Except there are stores on both sides of the parking lot. So you have to plan your shopping very carefully. You have no option: you must walk through the parking lot. Sometimes you have to cross the main path that cars drive on to enter the parking lot, which: good luck. If you're at Island's or the movie theater, and you decide you want to go to Barnes and Noble or Old Navy (or Staples, or Lowe's, or San's Club), you have to cross the parking lot again, subjecting yourself to a) a long walk, and b) the dangers of walking in traffic. (Or, as I've seen some people do, you can just go back to your car and drive to the other side of the mall: a perfectly easy, walkable distance, were it not for the speeding cars everywhere). There is no path for pedestrians. It's just stupid planning. The parking lot shouldn't be the focus of a mall! Yet at this mall, all you see is cars. And people dodging them.

There are other times when this lack of consideration for the pedestrian has frustrated me (as a pedestrian, I mean; as a driver, well, I only notice if some moron on foot is weaving all over the parking lot, looking for a long-lost vehicle), and I'm sure I've mentioned it before, and will again, but I really think they ("they!" I mean YOU, all the architects and landscape designers and parking lot engineers who read this blog!) should take more care and plan it better.

I also think they should abolish the "compact" car spaces. There's always some jerk in a Suburban who squeezes into these spots and ruins it for the rest of us.

Fine. Rant over.