ADA Parking Lot Striping
In Salt Lake City, UT

How Many Accessible Spaces Your Lot Needs

ADA parking lot striping in Salt Lake City must comply with both federal and state requirements. The 2010 ADA Standards for Accessible Design, enforced by the U.S. Department of Justice, set the minimum requirements for accessible parking spaces, access aisles, and signage. Utah’s Building Code adopts the International Building Code (IBC) with ADA Appendix D, and the Utah Antidiscrimination Act (Utah Code 57-21) provides additional state-level protections that reinforce these line marking and accessibility standards.

One thing to establish before the count, because almost no page states it: the 2010 Standards do not hover over every existing lot at all times. They attach by two separate routes. Altering a facility triggers 28 CFR 36.402, which requires the altered portion to be made accessible “to the maximum extent feasible.” Independently, a public accommodation owes ongoing barrier removal under 28 CFR 36.304(a) where that is “readily achievable” — easily accomplishable without much difficulty or expense, judged against the cost of the work and the resources of the business. And there is a safe harbor: elements not altered since March 15, 2012 that complied with the 1991 Standards are not required to be modified. DOJ’s own guidance on restriping parking spaces, the ADA Business Brief: Restriping Parking Spaces, treats a restripe as the occasion when the current count applies, and calls restriping “readily achievable in most cases” — while stating that its guidance has no force or effect of law.

Accessible parking space dimensions require a minimum 8-foot-wide stall with a 5-foot access aisle for standard spaces. Van-accessible spaces also require an 8-foot stall width but need an 8-foot access aisle and a minimum 98 inches of vertical clearance. The U.S. Access Board’s parking guidelines specify that accessible spaces must be located on the shortest accessible route to building entrances, with access aisle slopes not exceeding 2% in any direction.

ADA parking markings must remain clearly visible at all times. Faded line markings, worn access aisle boundaries, or missing signage put the property in violation regardless of whether the original striping was compliant. Salt Lake City’s winter conditions — snowplow traffic, salt, and freeze-thaw — accelerate marking deterioration. Regular maintenance services are essential: inspect ADA markings every spring and after any lot resurfacing work.

Two mistakes account for most of the count failures we find. The first is treating accessible spaces as an addition to the lot rather than a subset of it — a 100-space lot means 96 standard plus 4 accessible, not 104 total. The second is failing to recount after a restripe that added capacity: gaining eight stalls in a reconfiguration can push a lot from one band into the next, and the accessible count has to move with it.

Van-Accessible Spaces and Access Aisles

A standard accessible space is 8 feet wide with a 5-foot access aisle alongside it. A van-accessible space is 8 feet wide with a wider 8-foot access aisle — or alternatively, the space itself can be 11 feet wide with a 5-foot aisle. Van spaces also require 98 inches of vertical clearance over the space, its access aisle, and the vehicular route serving them, under Section 502.5. Signage must identify van-accessible spaces separately.

Accessible spaces must be located on the shortest accessible route to building entrances, with access aisle slopes not exceeding 2 percent in any direction. At least one in every six accessible spaces has to be van-accessible, which for most Salt Lake City commercial lots means the first one is. Two accessible spaces may share a single access aisle between them, which is frequently the most efficient layout and just as frequently missed.

What the ADA Does Not Specify About Marking

Section 502.3.3 of the 2010 ADA Standards for Accessible Design says, in full: “Access aisles shall be marked so as to discourage parking in them.” That is the requirement. The Advisory that accompanies it goes further and says the quiet part outright: “The method and color of marking are not specified by these requirements.”

So there is no federal blue mandate. Not for the access aisle hatching, not for the stall outline. Blue is convention: strong, near-universal, immediately recognized, and the thing we default to. It is not what the rule requires. The rule requires that the aisle be marked in a way that discourages parking in it, and it leaves the method to you.

Why this matters practically: it means a contractor cannot tell you your lot fails because the hatching is the wrong shade, and it means a jurisdiction or a private specification is free to require something more specific than the federal floor. When someone quotes you a mandatory color for an access aisle, ask which instrument sets it. Often the honest answer is convention, or a local requirement layered on top. Both are legitimate. Neither is the ADA.

The corollary matters more: because the federal rule specifies method loosely, the compliance risk on access aisles is almost never the shade of the paint. It is legibility. A perfectly-specified blue aisle that has faded to the point where drivers park across it is failing the actual requirement — discouraging parking — while a well-maintained aisle in a different treatment is meeting it.

ISA Symbols and Signage

Every accessible space carries the International Symbol of Accessibility. The requirement to sign the space comes from Section 216.5, not from the section people usually cite: “Parking spaces complying with 502 shall be identified by signs complying with 502.6.” Section 216.5 carries two exceptions — a site with four or fewer parking spaces in total, and residential spaces assigned to specific dwelling units — each of which excuses the sign only, never the space, the aisle, or the count, and neither of which displaces a state or local rule that requires signage anyway.

Section 502.6 is what governs the sign itself, and its mounting height is one of the few numbers here specified precisely — worth quoting exactly, because it is measured to a point people get wrong: “Signs shall be 60 inches (1525 mm) minimum above the finish floor or ground surface measured to the bottom of the sign.”

Measured to the bottom of the sign, not to its center and not to its top. That single word is the most common signage failure we correct on Salt Lake City lots — a sign hung to 60 inches at the middle sits low, and in a snow market a low sign is a buried sign. Van-accessible spaces carry an additional designation.

Access Aisle Placement

Section 502.7 of the 2010 Standards is usually paraphrased as a wheel-stop rule. It is not. It states an outcome: “Parking spaces and access aisles shall be designed so that cars and vans, when parked, cannot obstruct the required clear width of adjacent accessible routes.”

No device is named in the requirement itself. The Advisory published alongside it does name one — “Wheel stops are an effective way to prevent vehicle overhangs from reducing the clear width of accessible routes” — but an advisory recommends a means; it does not convert the requirement into a device mandate. Wheel stops are one way of achieving that outcome; so is a deeper stall, so is relocating the route, so is a curb the vehicle cannot reach. What the rule cares about is that a parked vehicle’s overhang does not eat the accessible route running past it. The classic failure is a stall that backs onto a sidewalk, where two feet of truck hood reduces a compliant walkway to a non-compliant one while the striping remains perfectly correct.

We design for the outcome and then choose the means for your site. If wheel stops are the right answer we say so; if the stall geometry can absorb the overhang without them, that is fewer objects in your lot to plow around.

Resurfacing and Recompliance

An overlay or a seal wipes the accessible markings off the lot, and the moment it does, the property’s compliance rests entirely on what gets painted back. This is the single most common way a compliant lot becomes a non-compliant one: the paving contractor restores the layout that was there, which was itself laid out under an older standard or before the lot gained spaces.

Resurfacing is the right moment to recount against Table 208.2, re-measure aisle widths, and re-check that the accessible spaces still sit on the shortest route to the entrance rather than where they historically landed. It costs nothing extra to get right while the surface is blank, and it is expensive to correct afterward.

Common Compliance Failures

What we actually find, in rough order of frequency:

• Faded markings on a technically-correct layout. The geometry passes and the paint does not. Legibility is the requirement.
• Count not recalculated after a restripe added stalls. The lot moved up a band; the accessible spaces did not.
• Signs hung to 60 inches at the wrong reference point. Measured to the middle rather than the bottom.
• Access aisle placed but not marked to discourage parking. An unmarked aisle reads as an empty gap and gets parked in.
• Accessible spaces on the far side of the lot. Correct in count and dimension, wrong on route.
• Overhang eating the adjacent walkway. The 502.7 outcome, failed by geometry rather than by paint.
• Slope. Nothing on the surface shows it, and it is the one failure a tape measure will not catch.