Most property managers inherit a parking lot that was already striped. The layout came with the building, and nobody has questioned it since.
This is a walkthrough of what actually goes into a commercial line striping job: what gets marked, what gets measured, and what a reasonable scope looks like when you are reading a bid.
What Line Striping Covers on a Commercial Lot
Line striping is the full marking system, not just the stall lines. On a typical retail or office property in Georgia, that means stalls, directional arrows, stop bars, crosswalks, fire lanes, loading zones, accessible stalls and access aisles, speed bump markings, and curb paint.
Those answer to different authorities. Fire lanes answer to the local fire marshal, and the lettering and spacing rules shift from one jurisdiction to the next. Accessible parking answers to the 2010 ADA Standards. Everything else is layout and traffic flow, which is where crew experience actually shows.
Parking Lot Line Striping
The Markings a Commercial Lot Needs
Stall lines. Four-inch white lines are the commercial standard. Single-line layouts are cheaper. Double-line layouts, which run two lines with roughly two feet between stalls, give drivers a visual buffer and reduce door dings. Retail centers and medical properties often pay for the double line for that reason.
Directional arrows and stop bars. These do the heavy lifting on traffic flow. Arrows at entrances and intersections, stop bars where a drive aisle meets a through lane. Lots that skip them tend to develop their own informal traffic patterns, and those are usually wrong.
Fire lanes. Typically red curb with white lettering, though the exact wording and letter spacing are set locally. Confirm this with the authority having jurisdiction rather than copying what the last contractor did.
Accessible stalls and access aisles. The access aisle has to be at least as long as the parking space it serves and marked in a way that discourages anyone parking in it. The 2010 ADA Standards do not actually dictate the color or the marking method. Blue lines and hatched aisles are convention and, in many cases, state or local code, so confirm what Georgia and your municipality require rather than assuming the federal standard covers it.
Loading and service zones. Marked so delivery vehicles have somewhere to sit that is not a fire lane or a drive aisle.
Crosswalks. Required at some properties, sensible at most, particularly anywhere pedestrians cross between a lot and a building entrance.
ADA Parking Signage and Access Aisles
The stall counts and dimensions are covered in detail in our breakdown of common striping mistakes. What gets overlooked more often is the vertical side of it.
Each accessible space needs a sign carrying the International Symbol of Accessibility, mounted so the bottom of the sign sits at least 60 inches above the ground. Van-accessible spaces need an additional designation. Paint alone does not satisfy the signage requirement, which surprises people who assume the symbol on the pavement is enough.
Access aisles need to connect to an accessible route into the building. An aisle that dumps a wheelchair user out behind a parked car or at a curb with no ramp is a layout problem that striping cannot solve on its own.
How the Parking Lot Layout Gets Measured
Before paint, a crew should be measuring the lot, not just eyeballing the old lines.
That means confirming stall widths and depths, checking drive aisle clearance, counting total spaces against the accessible parking the lot is required to carry, and walking the slope on any accessible space. It also means asking what the building is used for now, because required accessible counts follow use, and plenty of properties have changed tenants since the last layout.
This step is also where capacity gets found or lost. A lot of running 10-foot stalls when 9 feet would do is leaving space on the table.
What Happens on the Day of Work
Most commercial lots get striped in sections so the property keeps operating. Half the lot goes down, cures, opens, then the other half.
The sequence is usually blow and clean the surface, degrease and prime any oil spots, lay out and snap lines, paint, then barricade until cured. On a sealcoated lot, the striping follows the sealcoating by 24 to 48 hours.
Notify tenants before the crew arrives, not the morning of. The most common cause of a damaged fresh stripe is a tenant who did not know the lot was being worked on.
Scheduling Striping Around Your Tenants
Striping is usually done early morning, overnight, or on a weekend depending on the property type. Medical offices and retail centers tend to go overnight. Industrial and warehouse properties often have more daytime flexibility.
Humidity extends cure time, so a job planned around a tight reopening window needs some margin built into it.
Most properties also do better combining striping with sealcoating rather than scheduling them separately. One closure instead of two, and fresh paint on a freshly prepared surface holds its visibility longer.
Reading a Striping Bid
A bid worth taking seriously will name the paint product, state the application thickness, list the markings covered rather than saying “restripe lot,” and say who is responsible for measuring the layout.
If you are putting a scope together for a Georgia commercial property, Appell Striping can walk the lot and tell you what it actually needs.