Las Vegas School of Parking Lot and Road Design

Photos captured from Google Earth (click any for enlargement)

I had a frustrating day of driving and shopping today. I am not a fan of shopping, and traffic takes up 5 of my top 10 pet peeves. The longer I live in Las Vegas, the more convinced I become that there must be a special school for parking lot and road designers in this town.

Let's start with the "big box" shopping center around the corner from my house. If you're a good 'merican, you're combining your shopping trips in order to save gas, right? So you head out to the big box center, a place where you can get (almost) everything done. You pull in to the parking lot, and park down near the Supercuts for a new 'do (well, you do if you're me, and you really just mostly get it all clipped off). Mission accomplished, you decide to head over to the Home Depot for a seasonal major purchase.

You have three choices here. Walk half a mile. Follow the painted lines on the parking lot, and frustrate yourself out of your mind. Or plow through the painted lines to get to your destination, risking T-boning someone else, or having them T-bone you. Upon leaving the Home Depot, you head over to Sam's Club for some boxed wine, and are faced with the same three choices.

Next, you head to the post office. But you must puzzle out your route first, and the route to your next destination. You cannot enter from the east, and you cannot depart to the west. How convenient!

Having ironed out those details, you head out to the dreaded DMV. If there's one place in town that has a well laid-out parking lot (and supporting road structure), it should be the DMV, right? Wrong! You cannot approach from the east, or depart to the west or south! Throw in some narrowly painted lines, some blind alleys and some misleading pedestrian pathways, and you've got a cluster^%$# What is going on here?