Klass Has a Big Problem

Note: This is going to be more of a photo article than anything else. Since we all know that a picture is worth a thousand words, how better to tell this story?

Klass has a real problem – with parking.

To be honest, all of Kharkiv has a problem with parking. In fact, all of Ukraine has this affliction. This issue stems basically from two things. The first is having way too many cars for the available infrastructure. The second is a “me-first” mentality among too many people here that says, “I can do what I want, and I don’t care about anyone else.” And the more expensive the car, usually the worse this mentality becomes.

For the unindoctrinated, Klass is a chain of higher-end supermarkets in Kharkiv. I suppose they are in other cities too, but I never go anywhere, so I don’t know. In the spring of last year, a new Klass store opened right across the street from my apartment building. It’s very nice and has everything I could need, although the prices are a bit steep.

In preparation for opening the store, they completely remade the parking lot in front of the building. The lot was expanded, nicely paved, and marked with plenty of parking spots, including 12 handicapped spots close to the store. They even included five special spots with recharging stations for electric cars. Besides Klass, this parking lot services a row of new stores that were built on the southwest side of the lot, and it also services some shops that had already existed on the northeast side.

During that first spring and summer, parking didn’t really seem to be a problem. People pretty much parked where they were supposed to, and at first they even honored the handicapped spots. But this didn’t last for long.

We Don’t Need No Handicapped Spots

Sometime last summer, a few of the “I’m too important to follow rules” types began parking in the handicapped spots. Why not? After all, there are no handicapped people in Ukraine, right? And once this started, the floodgates opened. Now the handicapped spots are often the first to be taken (and never by anyone who really needs them).

To make matters worse, because these spots are wider than the normal spots, it’s not unusual to see three cars take up two of these spots. And it gets even worse: sometimes a car will park with two of its wheels barely in the spot and the rest of the car extended out into the travel lane, making it difficult for traffic to move around it.

And this is made even worse by cars that crowd up to the front of the store – where there are NO parking spaces – and park so that they also contribute to blocking the travel lanes. This has been happening more and more since early last winter.

Another thing that happened was that cars began to park all day long in the travel lanes on the northeast and southwest sides of the lot. They reduce what should be two lanes of travel down to one on each side, making it almost impossible for two cars to pass each other coming in opposite directions.

And, of course the parkers don’t stop with taking handicapped spots or blocking travel lanes. They have occasionally even taken to hiking their vehicles up on to the sidewalks or grassy areas. Often they even block pedestrians' ability to get by.

Of course, there is a grand tradition of parking on sidewalks in Ukraine. You see it all over Kharkiv, and I understand it’s many times worse in Kyiv. Who cares if you block pedestrians on their own sidewalks? If they don’t drive, they aren’t important.

And remember those special parking spots with charging stations for electric cars? Well, imagine owning an electric car and coming to Klass for a recharge, only to find that all the spots are filled with nonelectric cars. Yep, these drivers have no respect for anyone or anything.

Why Has This Happened?

As I mentioned, Ukraine suffers from a lack of parking infrastructure. But even when sufficient parking is available, there are still too many drivers who will park illegally just to save themselves a few steps or perhaps just because they believe rules don’t apply to them.

But I think the bigger issue at Klass, at least from Monday through Friday, is that the parking lot has increasingly come to be seen as “employee parking” for a number of businesses in the area. Every morning, I walk along the northeast side of the lot on my way to work, and I usually walk the same route home. And I have come to recognize a lot of the same cars parked there every day. They are not Klass customers, they are using the lot for all-day parking while they go to their jobs. Sadly, I suspect that a lot of people at my company are guilty of this.

All of this extra parking chokes the parking lot and leaves a lot fewer spaces for store customers, the people for whom the lot was built. And it’s just plain ridiculous to see how the intended purpose of this lot – to service store customers – has been superseded by selfish dolts looking for free all-day parking.

At night and on weekends, it’s an entirely different story. There is plenty of space. In spite of this, people still crowd into the handicapped spots and in the area in front of the store that was not intended for parking. Bad habits are hard to change.

But Klass Does Nothing

What sort of surprises me in all of this is that Klass does nothing about it. They don’t seem to care about what goes on in their parking lot, which shows in turn that they don’t give a damn for their customers. Well, I guess that shouldn’t surprise me: no companies here give a damn about people, even their paying customers, and there is no such thing here as social pressure to do the right thing. And there is certainly no such thing as obeying laws where driving and parking are concerned. If they can’t make money on it, Klass (and the police) could not be bothered.

But this is where Klass is missing a huge opportunity. This parking lot has a single choke-point entrance that would allow them to completely control ingress and egress. It would be a no-brainer to set up a system with gates to control the entry point.

People could take a ticket when they come in, get it validated when they make a purchase in Klass or one of the other shops, and then use the validated ticket to go back out. It would be fast and easy. And they could even offer longer-term (weekly or monthly) tickets for those who are willing to pay to park there during the day. The price could be high enough to dissuade the casual parkers, and it would reduce stress on the available spaces.

What’s more, Klass needs to clearly mark those travel lanes and the area immediately in front of the store as no-parking areas. Then they need to pay for some real enforcement to keep cars out of those areas and out of the handicapped spots. Enforcement should have teeth: tow the violators away.

Will Klass ever take such action? Of course not. It’s just a dream. Assholes will simply keep on being assholes.

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