Wednesday Open Line


Black Friday is behind us, but the holiday shopping season continues to build. People jamming the malls and department stores with their gift lists in hand are rediscovering one of the travails of the season — finding a place to park. When the mall lots and garages end up being full, many shoppers will turn to nearby commercial lots and garages. The first city parking garage in the U.S. opened this week in December of 1941 in Welch, West Virginia. It could handle 232 cars and showed a profit in its first year of operation. Today, in a nation with some 135 million privately owned cars, there are more than 18,000 parking facilities across the country, generating $8.5 billion in revenue annually. You can find more facts about America from the U.S. Census Bureau, online at <www.census.gov>.