Monroe Parking Garage — Local services in San Jose

Architecture is inspired by a variety of forms, beautiful and grand; the Westfield Valley Fair parking garage, however, must surely have been inspired by some preemptive vision akin to Dante's Inferno, for there is no image that better suites such a structure than the nine layers of hell. Scurrying, frantic vehicles circle endlessly through a confoundingly planned series of modern art ramps harkening to MC Escher stair-maze artwork; the two hours of free parking sound nice at the entrance, but quickly you'll find that nearly a quarter of your alloted time is thrown into a pit of misery, desperate drivers blocking lanes to Austin-Powers-Fifty-Point-Turn their SUVs into just-opened parking spots, green 'available' lights beckoning like sirens across the structure, pursued only to find every space filled, likely an intentional move to ensure visiting guests will have to pay to park in, may I remind you, a space built for spending your money to begin with. Exiting is no cakewalk either; Half the payment terminals direct you to use your phone to pay, but don't have any visible attached signage stating they're out of order until you try scanning your ticket, meaning you will often wait in line behind several soon-to-be frustrated fellow customers; complete this task, and you will immediately find yourself in a slowly progressing line of cars trapped in the same bizarro over-ground underworld, moving forward stop-by-stop through a checkpoint thay insists on spending a solid 30 seconds scanning your license plate before you can do anything to scan your ticket to leave. Make it through this trial, and you will next roll through a flurry of strange intersections, a detachment of overworked traffic officers blasting whistles and waving cars through winding webs of road; drive through, find a chaotic merging lane where two stop signs merge onto the same busy one-lane through road, putting you at the mercy of passing drivers, and make your way through. Then, and only then, can you finally make it out to the ordinary roads surrounding the mall to rejoin the...

My advice: if you can avoid it, don't go in the late afternoon on a Saturday - a lot of circling looking for a spot with the other 99-some cars looking, too. There is an indicator showing number of spots available but when I would go down that aisle, the 4 spots that were indicated as available were not there! Drat! I ended up just going towards higher ground at the very top of the garage where there were plenty of spots. The only good thing is that exiting I could just maintain a downward circle and avoid all the other cars that had driven in desperately looking for parking like I had a while ago....

I went this last Saturday, and the Monroe parking garage was definitely the wrong place to try and park. The first level was completely full, and I'm not sure why, but one of the ramps to go to the upper levels was closed off from the lower level. Getting to the other ramp was completely useless as it was blocked off with people who were trying to exit the garage. Since the garage was so full, the line to exit was extremely long and backed up with people who couldn't find parking.

Definitely not a bad parking garage during the week though. You can easily find...