ADA Parking for Oregon Retail & Shopping Centers

Big Lots, Many Doors, One Standard

A shopping center is not one business with one entrance. It is a row of tenants, each with its own door, sharing a large lot. That structure creates an ADA parking challenge that a single-tenant building never faces: the accessible spaces cannot all sit in one place. They have to be distributed so a customer headed to any storefront has a nearby accessible space and a clear route to that specific door.

This page covers ADA parking for Oregon retail and shopping centers, where dispersal, scale, and cart management drive most of the compliance issues. The foundational requirements are in our ADA parking compliance guide for Oregon.

Dispersal: The Rule That Defines Retail Compliance

The single most important retail-specific principle is dispersal. The ADA requires accessible spaces to be located on the shortest accessible route to the entrance they serve. In a multi-tenant center with entrances spread along the frontage, that means accessible spaces must be spread out so each entrance has accessible parking nearby.

Concentrating all the accessible spaces in front of one anchor tenant, or in one corner of the lot, fails the dispersal principle even if the raw count is technically met. A customer headed to a store at the far end of the center should not have to cross the entire lot from the only cluster of accessible spaces. When you stripe a shopping center, the accessible spaces get allocated to entrances, not piled in one spot.

Counting for a Large Lot

Shopping center lots are large, which puts them in the higher tiers of the count table. Our accessible parking count requirements page has the full scaling, but the key points for big lots:

• Up to 500 spaces, the requirement climbs by roughly one accessible space per 25 total
• From 501 to 1,000 spaces, the requirement is 2 percent of the total
• Over 1,000 spaces, it is 20 plus one per 100 over 1,000
• At least one in six accessible spaces, rounded up, must be van-accessible

A 600-space center needs 12 accessible spaces (2 percent), with at least two van-accessible. Those 12 then get dispersed across the entrances, not parked together. Getting both the count and the dispersal right is the retail compliance job.

Cart Corrals: The Aisle's Worst Enemy

Retail centers have shopping carts, and shopping carts need corrals. The corral placement is where retail lots quietly create violations. A cart corral positioned in or overlapping an access aisle blocks the very space a wheelchair user needs to deploy a lift and transfer. A corral that pushes carts into the accessible route obstructs the path to the door.

The fix is placement discipline: corrals belong away from accessible spaces and aisles, positioned so stray carts do not drift into them. This is partly a striping-layout decision and partly an operations practice, since even a well-placed corral fails if staff let carts pile up across an aisle. The aisle markings only work if the aisle stays clear, which our ADA access aisle striping spec page explains.

Routes Across a Big Lot

In a large retail lot, the accessible route has more distance and more drive aisles to cross. A customer traveling from an accessible space to a storefront may have to cross one or more vehicle lanes. The route must remain continuous and accessible the whole way, with marked crossings where it meets traffic and detectable warnings where required, as our ADA accessible route to the door page covers.

The bigger the lot, the more opportunities the route has to break: an un-ramped curb at the sidewalk, a landscape island forcing a detour, a slope that exceeds tolerance on a long run. Dispersing the accessible spaces near entrances helps, because shorter routes have fewer chances to fail.

Multi-Tenant Responsibility

A practical wrinkle in shopping centers is who is responsible for compliance. The common-area parking lot is typically the landlord's or property manager's responsibility, even though individual tenants depend on it. That means the entity striping and maintaining the lot, usually the property manager, owns the accessible-parking compliance for the whole center.

For a property manager running multiple Oregon centers, the smart approach is a portfolio view: audit each lot for count, dispersal, aisle, route, and signage, then address them on a coordinated maintenance schedule. Doing it lot by lot as complaints arrive is the expensive way.

This is general guidance, and each center's count, dispersal, and route depend on its specific layout, tenant frontage, and entrances, which a site survey confirms.