Show Notes:
Style Guide: Chapter 1: Parking Areas
- Section 1.1: Space – Ceiling Mounted Platforms, Storage Racks/Shelving, Cabinets/Storage Lockers
Residential Universal Design Specifications Discussed: Chapter 1: Parking Areas
- 1.1.1 Parking space width ≥ 11 feet.
- 1.1.2 Parking space length ≥ 20 feet.
- 1.1.3 Unobstructed width on all sides of parking space ≥ 3 feet.
- 1.1.5 Parking space slope ≤ 1:50.
Transcript:
Sarah: [00:00:00] You’re listening to Good Fit Poor Fit. Our podcast is part of The UD Project, a small business rooted in occupational therapy that looks at how the design of a home environment impacts how well people of different ages and abilities perform everyday activities. We chat about this unique perspective to boost your knowledge and help you consider what can be changed in communities like yours.
Learn more about our work at universaldesign.org.
This episode is part of an ongoing series here on Good Fit Poor Fit. We’re going deep on residential universal design specifications, walking through every major area of the home with an occupational therapy lens. Along the way, you’ll hear stories about real people. Whose lives are shaped by the design choices we discuss.
Whether you are a rehab therapist, a designer, a builder, or someone thinking [00:01:00] ahead about your own home, this series is built for you. Start with episode 107 for the full picture. A good fit doesn’t happen by accident. Let’s get into it.
Sarah: Hi, Good Fit Poor Fit listeners, and welcome back to another episode in our new series. Today is the first day where Rebecca and I will be discussing specifications and design ideas for the home. If you haven’t listened to our first three prep episodes, numbers 107 through 109, you should. We give you a good background to frame your perspective on what we’ll be talking about in regard to accessibility in the home. But if you’re all caught up and tracking along with us, first up is where it all begins for most of us, where a vehicle parks and the space around it, including how steep the parking area is. We’ll get into other specifications like surface type in future episodes.
Rebecca: Now, let’s preface this episode a little bit because I don’t want you to get caught up on vehicle ownership or home [00:02:00] styles, as we know that not everyone has a vehicle or lives in a single family home with a designated place to park that might be attached to their home. Today we’re going to speak more broadly about arriving and getting inside any home, which is something that we all have to do in some way.
Sarah: That’s right. So here is a scenario I want you to sit with for a minute You pull into a garage. You’ve had a long day. You cut the engine, open the driver’s door, and the door hits the wall, not because you parked badly, because that’s how much space you had to pull into. So you ease your body out sideways, squeeze between the car and the wall, then you remember that bag that you have in the back seat.
So you grab that off the seat by reaching through the front door into the back seat because you can’t get into the rear door at all. And then you navigate around the front bumper to get to the door into the house. It’s a process you do every single day. [00:03:00] Now, consider that same setup with someone who uses a walker and needs to open the door all the way to fold open a walker and get their body outside of the car.
If the space is just as small as I described, room for that task is not there. The problem is the amount of room available for parking and moving, but it goes deeper because the real story is about whether someone can get in and out of their own home independently.
Rebecca: Right. This is surely a space issue, but as OTs, we really see it as an environment and task mismatch. It’s great to have a garage to park your car in, but if you can’t open your car door in that garage, it’s not really serving you all that well. Similarly, if you live in a condo and park in a garage that attaches to your building, but the spaces are so small that you can’t get in and out of your car without hitting a wall or another car, that’s an access barrier, and you haven’t even reached the front door yet. It’s so easy to overlook parking when you’re [00:04:00] thinking about home accessibility, but being able to truly access and use a home involves getting to it and into it, so this is actually pretty important. So when OTs do home evaluations, we always ask people to walk us through how they get from the car inside their home, and I mean literally walk us through it or roll us through it or describe it in detail step by step. That sequence, parking, opening the door, exiting the vehicle, moving around or alongside the vehicle, getting to the entrance, that whole sequence is a series of physical and cognitive demands that many people never consciously think about until a situation where they’re forced to. The parking space itself is where the sequence starts. And I want to be clear about what we mean when we say parking space, because people hear that and think a lot of different things. And the dimensions we’re looking at here are not arbitrary. They come directly from analyzing what the task actually requires. The specs that we’re gonna talk about apply wherever you park, the [00:05:00] garage, the driveway, a carport, a parking pad. And maybe it’s a parking spot in a lot or along the street. The geometry is the same, regardless of whether there’s a roof over the spot or where it’s located. What changes is convenience. A covered space protects you from the elements while you’re doing all the things that we’re gonna talk about: loading groceries, getting babies, dogs out of the car, working on the car, deploying a ramp on a modified vehicle. These tasks don’t go away in the rain. A covered space just means you’re not also managing the weather while you’re doing them.
Sarah: Let’s start with the basics, and Rebecca, that was a great overview. So the specification for a parking space in a universally accessible home is a minimum width of eleven feet and a length of at least twenty feet. Think of a standard parking space that you’d see at a grocery store. That eleven feet is wider than a standard single-car parking space, which typically runs [00:06:00] eight to nine feet.
The length spec of at least twenty feet is around the typical length of that same parking spot that you’re used to seeing in a parking lot as well. And then to expand on those specifications, we suggest adding on top of that perimeter another clearance of at least three feet on all four sides of the vehicle.
Rebecca: And that distinction really matters. So clinically, we see people who have a garage that technically fits their car but doesn’t give them the room they need to function. So they default to the driveway because at least there’s no wall or clutter to contend with. The driveway then becomes an accessible parking option by default, but it wasn’t really designed that way. And that works until it’s January and snowing or August and a million degrees outside, or it’s raining sideways and you get soaking wet after being outside for about five seconds. The goal is to really create a space that meets the dimensional specs and provides [00:07:00] coverage because both of those things together are what make arrival and departure genuinely manageable and safe across a full range of conditions that a person might encounter.
Sarah: And also just plain convenient. So when we walk through the specs here, hold both of those ideas at once. The numbers apply everywhere, and the covered space is just the better version.
Rebecca: Absolutely. I think we can all agree with that if we’ve ever had to unload groceries in the middle of a rainstorm. But anyway, the width is where I always start when I’m thinking about this, because this is really surprising to people. 11 feet sounds like a lot of width until you think about what you’re actually doing when you exit a vehicle. You’re opening the door. The door itself should be able to swing all the way out so you can move your body around the door on all sides, which requires you to be able to position yourself to get into the vehicle. If the wall or some shrubbery or another car is right next to you, [00:08:00] you can’t open the door far enough to enter or exit safely. And for most people, that’s a nuisance. For someone who needs significant room to maneuver, that’s makes it pretty much impossible.
Sarah: And that’s why you see in public spaces the ADA accessible spots with those white hatched lines beside it. It’s providing that additional space for a person to get out of the vehicle without another vehicle blocking the space, and that’s why you see people get really mad when they’re parked in those spots.
This is especially important in the situation of using a modified vehicle with a ramp or a lift on the side for people to use with their mobility equipment. Yet this additional space we’re recommending touches daily life for almost everyone in ways people don’t often think about.
You come home from the grocery store. You’ve got groceries in the trunk and bags from work in the back seat. You need to make one trip. That requires getting to the side and the rear of the vehicle, open the doors [00:09:00] fully, and having room to stand there and load up. Or you’ve got a baby in a rear-facing car seat in the back passenger side. Getting that baby out requires opening the door as wide as it goes, leaning in at an angle, unclipping the harness, lifting the seat, and then maneuvering back out while holding the seat in one hand. You cannot do that with six inches between the door and a wall.
Rebecca: Ahh no, definitely not, and then there’s also what happens after you get that kid out of the car. You’re moving to a stroller. You need somewhere to set the car seat while you unfold and lock the stroller. You need room to maneuver both pieces of equipment before you start walking. That whole transition, which every parent with a young child does multiple times a day, requires space on the side of the vehicle and behind the vehicle. And when that space isn’t there, people develop workarounds so quickly that they stop registering them as workarounds and just assume that that’s the way it has to be.
Sarah: And [00:10:00] then we can’t forget about car maintenance. This is another dimension that often gets overlooked entirely in this conversation and goes great with the twenty feet of space for length of that parking area. Checking your oil, jumping a battery, swapping out a wiper blade, putting on a spare tire, these are tasks that happen at the front, rear, and sides of the vehicle.
Some of them require getting low, popping the hood, standing at the front of the car, or even having to maneuver underneath it. If your garage is sized so that the front bumper is eighteen inches from the back wall, you cannot safely work on the front of that car inside the garage unless you move it out a little bit.
You’re doing it in the driveway, whether you want to or not, which may mean you’re doing it in the rain or the blazing sun, or not doing it at all because it’s just too much. And honestly, who has ever wanted to pack their car for vacation out in the driveway in those types of conditions? How much nicer would it be to [00:11:00] do that undercover in a garage or a carport?
Rebecca: Alot nicer. I can say that my family was a pack the car for vacation on the driveway family, so I can absolutely attest to the inconvenience of this. It’s also just safer and easier when you’re able to pack a car and load up a car from inside of a covered garage. One of the things we think about in an activity analysis is not just whether someone can complete a task, like my poor dad loading our car for vacation on our driveway, but what the environment does to the cost of that task. A task that’s manageable in a well-designed environment becomes exhausting or impossible in a poorly designed one. Again, I’m thinking about my dad loading our car for a beach vacation when it was 100 degrees outside, being so sweaty that he then had to go in to take a shower before we left. Maintenance tasks that require squeezing around a car, bending in tight spaces, or repositioning repeatedly because there isn’t room to work, that’s another great example. Those adjustments, they add up, and they [00:12:00] can lead to injury, and they can be really dangerous. For someone managing pain, fatigue, or limited range of motion, that’s not a minor inconvenience. It’s a reason that the task might not get done.
Sarah: Exactly. So let’s talk about that additional three feet on all four sides that we’re recommending, because that is an extra thing that people don’t think about. I had some friends stop by yesterday, just in time for us to record this podcast, and they were complaining that their two SUVs couldn’t fit into some of the newer homes these days because they’re built too narrow. That’s the spec that most residential garages fail. I see garages being built just to say it’s being sold with a garage , but it’s only big enough to hold a smaller vehicle.
Then another scenario is that the garage has a nice footprint, but it’s small because of all of the other things that live there too.
We’re talking about trash cans and recycling [00:13:00] bins, the workbench with the tools and hardware and the shop vac underneath it. Don’t forget about the bikes that are hanging or maybe leaning. All the seasonal stuff, beach chairs, camping gear, the kids’ sports equipment, and the bins of holiday decorations.
Sometimes that space gets turned into a workout area as well. The garage in most American homes is doing three or four jobs at once, and the car often gets left out. When you park the car, you’re parking it into whatever space is left, which is often not very much. Additionally, and this is something we had to think about in our family, if you drive a modified vehicle from a power chair, often that driver’s seat is removed from the vehicle because the power chair needs to sit there, and it needs to be stored somewhere after you move it out, which is most likely, you guessed it, the garage.
Rebecca: So the garage can get pretty full, and none of those things are going [00:14:00] anywhere unless the family’s really great at organizing or willing to have a yard sale, which I think we all know is easier said than done. That’s not a criticism, it’s just a reality. Sometimes we just have too much stuff, and the combination of homes not having enough storage space, the garage can easily become an overflow storage area.
Sarah: There is also a slope specification, which is something we must talk about. The parking surface should have a slope no greater than one to fifty.
That means for every fifty inches of horizontal clearance, the surface rises or falls no more than one inch, which sounds like almost nothing until you think about what you’re actually doing on the surface. Most people see this slope that I just mentioned, the one to fifty, in a garage or carport-type setting where things are generally flat.
But if you’re parking out in the driveway, there is no telling what that slope will be. I’m sure you can all imagine, or maybe [00:15:00] you have a very steep driveway, and you’ve seen those driveways, and it’s very hard to navigate on.
Rebecca: When we were prepping for this podcast episode, I was sharing with Sarah about a neighbor of mine who has a driveway that absolutely does not abide by this specification. It is so steep, I cannot imagine even walking groceries up that driveway, let alone parking a car on it and unloading them from there.
Sarah: I have a very similar example in my neighborhood, they actually park the vehicle on the road because the driveway slopes all the way up to the garage door, making it almost impossible to get in and out on that slope and manage tasks around the vehicle.
Rebecca: Exiting a vehicle on a sloped surface like this is genuinely a different physical task than exiting on a flat one. When you step out of a car on a slope, you’re not stepping onto a stable, predictable surface. You’re stepping onto something that’s already pulling you in a certain direction, down the slope.
For my [00:16:00] physics nerds, we could get into that, but we won’t. If the driveway slopes away from the car, your first step is downhill, which means your weight is already moving backwards before you’ve found your footing. Cross-slope or the slope that goes side to side, is often the worst of all because it pushes you laterally or out to the side just as you’re most off balance, which is the moment when you have one foot in the car and one foot out.
Sarah: Oftentimes, that can come as a surprise, especially if you have a guest parking in your driveway. They’re not used to getting in and out at that type of slope.
For slopes between the extremes of flat and scaling a mountain, people on most days find it manageable. You adjust without thinking about it.
For someone using a walker, that first step out of the vehicle onto a slope has to be controlled carefully because the walker may tip to one side if they put uneven weight through their hands. For a wheelchair user, a sloped surface, even with the brakes on, on the wheelchair, [00:17:00] has the possibility of the wheelchair rolling or shifting, which makes the transfer from the vehicle to the chair significantly more demanding.
And if they’re using a sliding board, which is like a little bridge for a person to go, from inside the car out and back and forth, they are either sliding up or down as it mimics the outside slope, making the transfer even more challenging than if it was flat.
Rebecca: And for anyone with a balance condition, vertigo, neuropathy, or reduced lower extremity strength, slope requires their body to be constantly making small corrections on uneven or sloped surfaces, and that work happens below the level of conscious awareness for most people. When that automatic correction system is compromised, a slope that nobody else would even think twice about can become a hazard. And honestly, it’s interesting how we become so used to our own workarounds, never identifying the environment as a problem. But let’s look at an example of this.
Sarah: Yes, so [00:18:00] now we’re gonna drop in on Margaret. We briefly introduced her before in a previous episode. She’s 58 years old. She was diagnosed with MS, which is multiple sclerosis, about 12 years ago, and she has adapted her life in ways she probably would describe as practical.
She has a go-with-the-flow personality and has made changes as needed with things she’s experienced because that’s just kind of the person she is. With MS, or multiple sclerosis, she can have easy days and then hard days. As she’s dealing with fatigue and lower extremity weakness, using a power chair to drive in her accessible van has allowed her to remain independent.
She and her husband live in a home that they built twenty years ago, before either of them had given much thought to any change in health or function. The home was built around the life that they had at the time, which is true of most people when they’re thinking about their homes. They have a one-car garage just big enough for the [00:19:00] SUV her husband drives.
But as for the van, it was acquired later and equipped with a side entry ramp, which needs a minimum of fifty-two inches to fully extend, and then at least three feet or more clearance beyond the ramp for her to get on and off it on a flat surface. Basically, she needs the width of two parking spaces put together, if that’s helpful as you’re imagining it.
Unfortunately, she’s not able to make that happen in the current single-stall garage, as it’s just too small. So she did what she needed to do, and she parks in the driveway, even in the rain, heat, and snow. Thankfully, there’s a flat portion at the top. Just as I described a little earlier, many driveways don’t have that flat portion at the top, but that gives her the room the garage doesn’t.
Rebecca: So this story is a great example of what I mentioned before. Workarounds that become so embedded in our routines that we don’t describe [00:20:00] them as problems unless someone specifically asks us about them. Of course, this is particularly significant for people within the disability community, such as folks with MS, like Margaret, whose day-to-day functioning and energy levels could vary greatly.
Now let’s take a problem-solving lens to Margaret’s situation.
Sarah: If you’re analyzing Margaret’s situation, what she needs is not complicated. The van is the solution she already has. The driveway is the workaround she shouldn’t have to use, but she’s glad it’s an option, even if it isn’t perfect.
And the garage configured around a parking spec that accounts for her van and for her would mean she comes home through a protected, covered space instead of an open driveway every day. That’s the difference we’re talking about.
Rebecca: And what an important difference that is. We know many people out there are in the same position, so let’s think about this in three layers. What you can do right now without spending much or anything, what you can do [00:21:00] with some targeted investment, and what the right answers look like at the design and construction stage. I wanna be clear before we start, the solutions in the first two tiers that we’re gonna talk about are real solutions. They’re not consolation prizes. They’re appropriate for a lot of situations. But the third tier is where we get to talk about what the home should have looked like or could look like from the beginning. And that conversation matters whether you’re building new, planning a significant renovation, or just trying to understand what you’re dealing with. So let’s start with the no to low-cost option. In the garage, the most immediate thing you can do costs almost nothing. Take inventory of what the space is actually doing. Most garages have evolved organically over the years. The trash and recycling bins ended up against one wall. The workbench claimed the back. The bikes are somewhere in the middle. The equipment, beach chairs and camping bins, holiday boxes, they just ended up settling wherever there was room. Nobody really designed it that way.
It just kind of [00:22:00] happened.
Sarah: Rebecca, I think you’re looking into my garage because that has happened so easily. You walk out the door, you put something down, and then it just stays there. So the first question worth asking is whether the things taking up the floor space could maybe take up space elsewhere, like the ceiling or maybe the wall.
Bikes that are leaning or sitting on the floor could be wall-mounted onto hooks. Sports equipment can go on wall-mounted racks or shelves out of the way of your car doors opening. That is something that you want to consider. You should also consider moving them from the garage completely and put in an outdoor weatherproof box on the side of the house.
Seasonal bins can go onto ceiling platforms as well. We do have a style guide that, we created within our organization, and I have it linked in the show notes. It has some really good examples in this first chapter for ceiling lifts, wall-mounted systems, overhead configurations. It might be really helpful as you’re thinking through this [00:23:00] space.
The principle is straightforward. Anything that can be moved off the floor onto the wall, into the air is probably a good idea. Additionally, taking note of what’s not used and toss it or donate it.
Rebecca: I think another thing to think about in this space is trash and recycling because they’re heavy, you access them regularly for most of us at least once a week, and they’re often positioned wherever was easiest when someone first moved in. So moving them to a position that doesn’t cut into the perimeter clearance on the driver’s side is a free change that can meaningfully open up the working space around your car.
Sarah: Yes, reorganization is definitely a no-cost option. The other no-cost adjustment is simply where you park.
Rebecca: Let’s say you have a two or three-car garage. If these are built to standard dimensions, these can often provide the accessible clearance needed for one vehicle, assuming the space is managed with care and planning.
Sarah: Park toward the center rather than toward one wall. Intentional positioning within the available space is free and [00:24:00] immediate.
Rebecca: What you’d probably wanna do in this scenario is consistently park your car is in the same spots where access needs have been properly set up for each driver. Then you’ll also wanna make sure that you protect the spaces around each of these cars to ensure that storage doesn’t drift into any key spots as time goes on.
Sarah: Exactly. It’s a mental note. Do not put the cardboard boxes in that spot.
Honestly, for situations like Margaret’s, the compromise of parking in the driveway may actually be the best current option, if the garage can’t be reconfigured. She just determines the best place to park that connects to the easiest pathway to get inside. We’ll talk more about that in future episodes.
Rebecca: So let’s move on to the mid-range changes that you could look at. The mid-range tier is where more deliberate garage organization becomes a real project. Wall-mounted storage systems going beyond your basic pegboard, ceiling platforms that are electronic, a proper bike hoist, a [00:25:00] workbench that’s designed to occupy the wall efficiently rather than sprawl into the room. These are investments in the $500 to $2,000 range, depending on scope and whether you’re doing it yourself or hiring someone to do it for you. The goal is the same as the no-cost tier, getting the floor clear, but with more permanence and more capacity.
Sarah: Another idea I had about that workbench you could also find a table that folds down when not in use to make the space flexible when you need it. So there is some creativity involved here as well.
Rebecca: Definitely, and I love the idea of the fold-out workbench, if possible. So for households considering a carport rather than a full garage, there’s also a real mid-range case for a covered carport addition. A carport can be built to the right dimensions from the start, 11 feet wide, 20 feet long, and three feet of perimeter clearance. And because it’s open-sided rather than [00:26:00] enclosed, the clearance is easier to achieve, and there’s no enclosed space to accumulate clutter. We’ll talk more about carports in the next episode, but they’re worth naming here as a meaningful option for people working with a driveway situation.
Sarah: So the last tier we’re gonna talk about really involves these structural changes, and we’ll have to be honest about this because it can get pretty expensive.
Rebecca: So to genuinely meet the spec in a standard single-car bay, you’re often looking at widening the garage. That’s structural work, and it involves the foundation, the walls, the roof line, potentially the driveway approach. It’s a big project. Depending on market and scope, you’re looking at 20 to $50,000 or maybe even more to properly expand and rebuild a garage bay to accessible dimensions. You’ll also have to consider what codes you have to abide by, considering how much room you have between yours and your neighbor’s property line.
Sarah: And what that number tells you is exactly why this is a design stage conversation. When a [00:27:00] garage is designed from the beginning to be fourteen or fifteen feet wide instead of ten or twelve, the cost difference is a fraction of what expansion costs later.The concrete is already being poured. The walls are already being framed. Going wider at that stage adds very little. Going wider after the fact means starting over on the entire structure.
Rebecca: Yes, and the slope is kind of the same story. When a driveway is being graded and paved, getting the slope right to meet the one to 50 specs costs almost nothing extra. It’s a specification instruction to the contractor. Regrading an existing driveway is a real project with real cost and might not even be possible with how the property slopes.
Sarah: Yes, that’s the big kicker is what does the property look like and how much room you have. I know my mother-in-law, she actually created a new flat parking pad in her front yard to allow for my husband to get out of his car and into the home [00:28:00] easier without having to go up a steep driveway.
I think there’s always options to consider in some home configurations if it’s possible to add a new parking space in the yard. Yet, for anyone building new or doing a significant renovation, this is the episode to keep in your back pocket when you’re having the conversation with your builder about garage dimensions.
Again, if you haven’t heard it already or had forgotten the specs, it’s eleven feet wide, twenty feet long, and three feet of perimeter clearance on all four sides, and a parking s-surface slope of no more than one to fifty. Those are the numbers. They’re not negotiable if the goal is a space that works for everyone who might use it.
The concrete thing I ask you to think about this week, whether you’re a homeowner, a caregiver, or a builder, is to actually measure the space and clearance around a vehicle in your garage or on your driveway.
Open all four doors and see how much room is left. Then think about doing that with a walker alongside you, or maybe a [00:29:00] stroller or a side entry ramp deployed, maybe two people trying to move around the vehicle at the same time. All of those tasks are meaningful and can be difficult when the measurements aren’t correct.
Rebecca: The width, the length, additional clearance around the vehicle, and the slope of the ground, those are the foundations, no matter if the space is enclosed, covered, or open to the sky.
But I think that’s good for now. Next episode, we’re gonna stay in parking and arrival, but we’re gonna look more at covered parking and garage access specifically, including why the height of your garage door opening matters and what power openers can actually do for people who need them. It connects directly to everything we talked about today, and we can’t wait to go there with you next week, listeners. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back in the feed soon.
Sarah: Thanks for listening to Good Fit Poor Fit. If you want to learn more… first, find more episodes with transcripts and show notes at goodfitpoorfit.com. Don’t forget to subscribe! Second, [00:30:00] check out our courses at universaldesign.org.
We cover housing topics like advocacy, collaboration, home modification, universal design and task adaptations. Lastly, if you have questions or topics you’d like us to discuss, email us at [email protected]. Thanks for fitting us into your day.
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