parking mandates: restaurants

As I've discussed in the past, US zoning laws tend to require huge amounts of parking. For offices a common ratio is 3 or 4 spaces per 1000 sqft of office; since parking lots use 330 sqft per parking space, that's 1000-1300 sqft parking per 1000 sqft office. Thus suburban office parks, of a one-story building surrounded by somewhat more parking.

Restaurant mandates are often wonkier so I've tended to pass over them, but for reasons I was doing some reading about restaurant sizes which led me back. Sometimes zoning does use floor space, like 1 parking space per 100 (hundred) sqft of gross area, or 1 per 50 sqft of dining area. Others go by number of seats, or legal customer capacity, and how much space did those take? I didn't know, but now I do.

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