Danielle Noble has a war story about parking in L.A.

Pulling into the Beverly Center one Saturday she couldn’t quite reach for the parking ticket because the driver-side electric window of her Volkswagen Jetta was broken. Complicating matters, she opened the door without quite putting the vehicle into park, “so the car started rolling backwards with me half in it,” said Noble, a West Hollywood social worker.

Her car stopped just short of slamming into the black SUV behind her when the open door clunked into a barrier pole. She managed to climb back into the car but her door was so badly damaged that she had to literally hold onto it while driving through the entire structure to reach an exit.

Now, Noble won’t go into the mall, which she calls “the never-leave center.”

“Every time I drive up there, I see my green paint marks on the ticket pole dispenser,” she said.

In car-saturated Southern California, it’s all about parking whether it’s plentiful, accessible or affordable helps determine if shoppers return to a mall or tenants fill an office building.

There are roughly 1,200 parking lots and garages in the city of Los Angeles and each one of them holds its own surprises: Is the lot easy to get into? Is there adequate room to maneuver? How wide are the spaces? How many ticket booths are open when you want to exit? As seen in an unscientific sample of parking garages around town (page 18), there is a wide array of the good, the bad and the downright nightmarish.

Parking has reached the point that earlier this summer the state’s Historical Resources Commission designated the Beaux Arts building on Grand Avenue, which was built in 1924 and once hoisted cars on an elevator eight stories, as a historic landmark.

“It gets talked about a lot over coffee and cocktails,” said John Given, a senior vice president with developer CIM Group Inc. “Parking and traffic is something everybody has an opinion about and everyone thinks they know something about.”

These days, developers face challenges that go well beyond aesthetics. If a project requires underground parking, as many do, it can consume a quarter of the construction costs. One reason is the geology of Los Angeles, which, with its high water table and deposits of methane gas, can turn a parking project into an engineering obstacle course. Adding to the cost are steel and concrete, whose prices have more than doubled in the last year and a half.

As a rule, developers say the average 60-spot underground garage in urban areas of Los Angeles County will cost $25,000 per spot. But that price can double if they have to dig additional levels. There is only so deep a garage can go before it becomes too expensive to build. “You have to either buy more land or figure out the most efficient way of getting parking offsite,” Given said.

Then there are the regulations. Within Los Angeles County, each of the 88 municipalities sets its own parking requirements.

The city of Los Angeles requires parking spaces to be at least 9 feet across and 20 feet long, though the size can vary slightly depending on the angle of slot. Ten percent of all parking spots must be dedicated for compact cars, said Alan Willis, principal transportation engineer with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation.

The city typically requires office buildings to provide about 2.5 spaces per 1,000 square feet of office space, although builders of many high-end complexes opt to provide more than that. For apartments and condominiums, L.A. requires about 1.5 spaces for a one-bedroom or about 2.5 spaces for a two-bedroom.

“The cost to develop a parking facility is extremely expensive and revenues generated from a typical operation do not usually make a good investment if it were a stand-alone investment,” said Jeff Okyle, vice president of business development at parking lot operator Standard Parking. “That begs the question: Why would a developer build parking? The answer is in L.A. we are so dependent on our cars, in order to lease the space, parking must go along with it.”

‘Very sensitive issue’

What developers have come to realize is that parking availability can play an important role in determining a building’s success. Many times parking provides first impressions that can either assist or hamper the signing of a new tenant.

“It can become one of the most powerful services in a building,” said Bert Dezzutti, a senior vice president based in the L.A. office of Equity Office Properties Trust. “Often it’s mentioned in renewal discussions when tenants decide whether they want to stay in the building.”

Arnold Peter, a partner at law firm Lord Bissell & Brook LLP, said One California Plaza has plenty of parking spaces, and the garage is well organized, brightly lit and the signs are easy to read.

His one complaint: “To access the garage you have to enter on a street that’s different from our address,” he said. “So you have to give visitors very precise directions about how to get into the garage, but even then they often get lost.”

For retail properties, good parking is perhaps even more important.

Take the 2001 launch of the Hollywood & Highland shopping and entertainment complex, where the City of Los Angeles initially charged $10 to park in the vast underground garage it owns underneath a turn-off to many shoppers.

Even now, nearly two years after L.A. lowered the cost of parking to $2 with validation, the city and the CIM Group, Hollywood & Highland’s new owners, still run ads about the lower price.

“Parking is a very sensitive issue and you have to step into it very softly and very carefully,” Given said. “If you open up a project and begin charging too high a price, people remember that.”

Convenience is a big deal as well. Organizers of Town Hall Los Angeles require venues that can quickly move attendees in and out of hotel parking garages for lunchtime speaking events.

“If people have to spend another half-hour or 45 minutes to retrieve their car, then of course we have to ask the venue to improve or we can’t use them anymore,” said Adrienne Medawar, president of the non-profit organization. “If they’re not out at 1:30, that’s our fault. It negatively impacts people wanting to come to our events again.”

Parking wasn’t really an issue downtown until just before the outbreak of World War II. Until then, parking lots were few and far between, and cars fought for space on the bustling streets with Red Car trolleys.

“In the old days, in the 1920s and 1930s, there weren’t any parking lots,” Willis said. “Even later on there were just a handful of surface lots. Where there are current parking lots, those are locations where buildings have been demolished.”

During the post-war period, the city had to address parking downtown as residents moved out of urban areas and the Red Car system was dismantled. “The residents moved out and businesses moved in,” he said. “Those who could afford it left downtown.”

Bunker Hill was bulldozed and rezoned to make way for high-rise office buildings. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that developers began putting parking underneath their projects.

Downtown Los Angeles has been a flashpoint when it comes to poorly utilized and confusing parking. In the early 1980s, the city directed developers of high-rise properties to build off-site facilities in anticipation of a rush of new building. The idea was to mitigate traffic snarls in the city’s center by locating parking on the outskirts of downtown and shuttle workers into the office.

The plan became cumbersome, and when the expected rush of commercial space never materialized, developers abandoned the Peripheral Parking Plan. Reminders of the ill-conceived idea still linger, notably a garage built by Maguire Partners at 17th Street and Grand Avenue that sits empty to this day.

Parking can generate nominal revenue, but developers and office building owners insist that it doesn’t come close to covering the cost of building and operating a facility. “It’s nothing compared to the office rates,” said Christopher P. Houge, a principal at brokerage Madison Partners.

Most times, those rates are determined by an outside parking operator brought in to run the garage for the building’s owner. “To determine parking rates, it’s a combination of the landlord’s input, market comparisons, the type of facility and the services offered the tenants as well as the quality of the building,” said Okyle.

For CIM Group’s Gas Company Lofts project, which will include a much-anticipated Ralphs supermarket, one big question is whether there will be a charge for parking something the grocery chain has yet to decide.

Jerome Snyder, principal of J.H. Snyder & Co., said shoppers are charged a dollar for parking at most of his centers. Instead of some complex algorithm to determine price, he trusts his instincts. “Why do I only charge a dollar?” he asked. “Because I don’t think people would pay two.”

‘Electronic’ parking

But the dynamics of parking involve more than money, which is where technology enters the picture.

Kiosks now allow motorists to insert their parking stubs into a machine and pay with cash or a credit card. Drivers then exit through an automatic tollbooth after inserting the paid card.

Standard Parking, like other operators, has placed automatic exit systems in a number of garages it manages, including the Trillium and Bank of America Plaza, and it plans to install them in City National Bank Plaza and the MCI Center, among others.

“We are always looking to add services that making parking easier,” said Okyle. “It helps drivers get out more efficiently, and it saves landlords money and gives them more control over the money being collected.”

In addition, new garages have computerized controls to gauge not just the number of people entering a parking structure, but which employees are entering or exiting, and at what time. “We’re not operating the structures with the old cigar box, where you pay a guy a buck and just drive in,” said Ron Saxton, a parking engineer at International Parking Design Inc. in Sherman Oaks.

More sophisticated equipment will allow drivers to select their spot based on location parking close to an elevator, for example, could involve a higher charge, while rooftop parking might be cheaper.

But no matter how efficient and well-designed the structure, there are times when there are just too many cars leaving at the same time. “Parking has a fairly inflexible geometry to it,” Given said. “You can fit a lot of things to a site but you can’t easily fit parking.”

-Staff reporters Kate Berry, David Greenberg, Kathryn Maese, Matt Myerhoff and Anthony Palazzo contributed to this story.