Centro Comerciales Estaci BY DENNIS CUNNING W
HAT PAID PARKING FACIL- ity averages 17,000 transient tickets and 1,250 monthly cus- tomers every day Monday through Thursday, and 20,000
transient tickets and 1,000monthly customers parking each day on the Friday through Sunday weekend? Oh, and during the Christmas season, the volume peaks at 27,000 transient tickets and 1,700 monthly customers a day?
The answer –CentroComerciales Santa Fe, an upscale shop-
ping mall in the suburbs of Mexico City. * The article’s title, “Shopping Center Parking,” was a clue for our bilingual readers. Sometimes,we parking folks in Europe, theU.S., Canada or
Australia think we are all-knowing in parking operations, espe- cially large-scale
facilities.Many of uswould never think ofMex- ico having such a facility, the skills to operate it or the economy to support such a facility.Well, take a step back and discoverwhat is involved in running a major parking complex by any world stan- dard and one that is difficult tomatch anywhere in theU.S. Centro Santa Fe, as it is commonly called, is off the highway
betweenMexico City and Toluca. Let’s put the shopping center into perspective so that you can compare it with your own local mall. The development is set on about 20 acres. There are 322 tenants in the 650,000 square feet of retail space, and 5,320 park- ing spaces. It has 13 entrance lanes and 16 exit lanes, with seven central registers located within themall.
The parking management company Entra has a 90-person
staff to operate the 24/7 facility. Comparing the 2005 ticket volume with the 2008 volume of
6.48 million collected tickets shows a growth of 11.2%, (Even more staggering are the revenues generated by this operation.) Add in the 500,000 monthly vehicles, and you have more than 6.9million vehicles a year using this facility. Take a moment to reflect on how many vehicles this is on a
daily basis. It is more than many garages do in a month or months, and Centro Santa Fe does it every day. Just keeping the ticket dispensers full is an issue. Ordering a million tickets every eight weeks and the lead time to get them throughMexican cus- toms is another task that most garage operations never think about on amonthly basis The average ticket is 2 hours and 10 minutes, and the aver-
age ticket price is about 22 ($1.45) pesos. That’s not a bad aver- agewhen you consider that 35%of all tickets collected (2.23mil- lion of them) are within the 15minutes free grace period. Transient rates range from 20 pesos for 16 minutes to 2
hours and 30 minutes – the first paid rate increment – up to a 24 hour maximum rate of 100 pesos. There are seven incremental steps between the 22 peso and 100 peso rates. All who work at Centro Santa Fe must pay for parking,
including the parking operator and its employees. Space is sim- ply too valuable to permit free parking for the eight to 10 hours a day that an employee works and those “long term” spaces do not turn over. Monthly rates for employees range from 150 to 390 pesos per month. There were 2,530 paid monthly cards in January 2009.
Centro Comerciales Santa Fe,Mexico City. 38 APRIL 2009 • PARKING TODAY •
www.parkingtoday.com
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