This is a design page for property managers, HOA boards, building owners and parking operators. It starts with the illumination Los Angeles actually requires, explains what that does to a camera, then names the four zones, works a 23-camera schedule for a real structure and gives you the ten lines that make bids comparable.
Most parking-garage footage in Los Angeles is unusable for one reason, and it is not the cameras. Los Angeles Municipal Code § 91.6305.1 requires a parking garage serving dwelling units or guest rooms to provide “a minimum average surface illumination of 0.2 footcandles (2.15 lx) at floor level”, from a light source no more than eight feet up. ASIS International’s Protection of Assets manual puts adequate security illumination in a parking structure at 5 footcandles with a 4:1 average-to-minimum uniformity ratio. That is a twenty-five-fold gap, and sitting at the bottom of it is entirely legal.
A camera cannot invent light. Resolution, shutter speed, infrared, mounting height and camera count are all downstream of how much light is on the floor. Design the lighting and the cameras together, or budget for footage of a shape moving between two cars.
| Source | Level it sets | What that means at the camera |
|---|---|---|
| LAMC § 91.6305.1 — garages serving dwelling units or guest rooms | 0.2 fc (2.15 lx) minimum average at floor level; light source at or below 8 ft; minimum 60 W incandescent or equivalent | Compliant and nearly dark. Colour is gone; the camera is in black-and-white, leaning on gain, and noise is eating detail |
| LAMC § 91.6305.2 — exterior areas accessory to apartment houses | Same 0.2 fc floor; exterior lighting brighter than 2 fc that affects neighbouring residential property must be motion-activated for no more than 20 minutes | Exposure changes in the middle of an event. The first two seconds of the clip are the dark ones |
| ASIS Protection of Assets — parking structures | 5 fc horizontal with a 4:1 average-to-minimum ratio | The level at which cameras can be specified normally instead of heroically |
| ASIS Protection of Assets — open parking | 0.2 fc in low-activity areas up to 2 fc in high-activity vehicle areas; minimum 5 fc at cash collection and vehicular access control | The entry and exit lanes need their own lighting design, not the aisle’s |
Note the scope: § 91.6305 governs garages serving dwelling units or guest rooms. A commercial-only structure is not covered at all — which usually means no floor whatsoever, just whatever the original design delivered minus fifteen years of lamp depreciation.
Uniformity beats brightness. Protection of Assets notes that structures are hard to light because there are few vertical surfaces to reflect light or give a moving body contrast, and low clearance forces fixtures to spread light horizontally. A deck averaging 5 footcandles but dropping to half a footcandle between columns still loses the person behind the van. Ask for the average-to-minimum ratio, not the average.
A fixture aimed at your camera is worse than no fixture. The same manual says luminaires should be selected to reduce glare at the lens where cameras are used. The LED retrofit that made the garage feel brighter is often what blew out the footage. Walk the structure after dark and look at each camera’s live image, not at the ceiling.
One caution on the datasheet rather than the building: ultra-low-lux colour figures are close to meaningless as published, because there is no uniform industry method for measuring minimum illumination. A usable spec states f-stop, colour temperature, exposure time, the IRE level accepted as white, gain and signal-to-noise, with 30 IRE the usual floor for a meaningful image. Many published numbers are taken at the widest iris and the slowest shutter the camera allows. A figure produced at a quarter-second exposure says nothing about a person walking. Ask what shutter speed it assumes.
“How many cameras does my garage need” has no answer until the zones are named. Every parking facility has the same four, and each is a different camera job with a different failure mode.
| Zone | What the footage must prove | How it usually fails |
|---|---|---|
| Entry and exit lanes | Which vehicle, which plate, which direction, at what time | One camera asked to cover the lane and read the plate, then blown out by daylight at the mouth of the ramp |
| Drive aisles and bays | The route a person or vehicle took through the structure, level by level | Cameras parked at the ends of long aisles, so everything of interest happens 120 feet away and eight pixels tall |
| Pedestrian pinch points | A recognisable face | Cameras looking down at the top of a hat from fourteen feet; stair doors and elevator lobbies skipped because they are “inside” |
| Perimeter openings | Who entered on foot, and from which street | The vehicle gate is covered while three open pedestrian gaps in the façade are not |
The identification budget belongs at the pinch points — the elevator lobby, the stair door, the door into the building, the pay station. There you mount low, at face height on the approach, and accept a narrow view in exchange for a face a detective can use. Everywhere else you are buying context, and context is cheap.
The ramp mouth has two problems at once. At midday the outside can be tens of thousands of lux while the inside sits near the code minimum, and no single exposure holds both. And the subject is moving.
Design against what happens on your site, not against a package tier.
This is a commodity-price crime: volume tracks rhodium, palladium and platinum. Claim counts peaked around 2022, fell sharply through 2024 as those metals crashed, and have been reported climbing again through 2025 and 2026 as prices recovered. Plan for the cycle, not for this month. The design consequence is specific: the cut happens under a vehicle, in a bay, in a couple of minutes, usually by someone who arrived in a car. The bay camera rarely gives you a face. The case comes from the lane — the plate of the vehicle that brought them, timestamped either side of that window. It is the strongest argument for spending properly on the entry and exit cameras.
Charging cables are copper, and CISA has issued a cross-sector alert on copper wire theft from EV charging stations. A cut cable puts the charger out of service until it is replaced, so a bank of chargers is a target cluster rather than an amenity. They earn their own camera at recognition distance — close enough to show hands at the cable and a face — not a corner view from across the deck.
Smash-and-walk generates the emails to the board, and it is exactly what eight-pixels-per-foot aisle coverage cannot document. Residential structures add bicycles, scooters and the package room; everywhere, add people tailgating in on foot behind a car, which is why the pedestrian openings matter as much as the ramp.
One legal note in passing: leave the microphones switched off. California’s all-party consent rule under Penal Code § 632 makes recorded audio a materially different question from recorded video. Our California security camera laws guide covers the boundaries, and the apartment building camera guide covers resident-privacy limits in a residential structure.
| Position | Qty | Camera | Must show |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry lane — overview | 1 | Wide, high WDR | The vehicle, the driver’s side, the barrier state |
| Entry lane — plate | 1 | Dedicated plate camera, tight FOV, fast shutter | At least 100 pixels across the plate, day and night |
| Exit lane — overview and plate | 2 | As above | The same, in the leaving direction |
| Pedestrian openings in the façade | 2 | IK10 dome, face height on the approach | A recognisable face entering on foot |
| Elevator lobby, each level | 2 | IK10 dome, aimed along the approach | A face, not the top of a head |
| Stair door, each level | 2 | IK10 dome | Who used the stair, and when |
| Drive aisles | 6 | Wide, mounted mid-aisle facing along it | Route and direction, level by level |
| Bays and rows | 4 | Wide, cross-aisle | Which bay a person stopped at |
| EV charger cluster | 1 | Recognition distance | Hands at the cable, and a face |
| Pay station or valet podium | 1 | Tight | The transaction and the person |
| Recorder room door | 1 | IK10 dome | Who went into the room holding your evidence |
Twenty-three cameras. A single-level surface lot with one entrance commonly lands at eight to twelve; a five-level structure under a mixed-use building goes past sixty. The count follows the zones and the pinch points, never the stall count — anyone quoting “one camera per twenty stalls” is quoting a price, not a design.
Send the same ten lines to every company you ask, and the quotes become comparable in an afternoon.
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How we quote a structure: a free on-site survey with light levels measured at floor level, a line-item proposal with model numbers within two business days, no final price given sight-unseen, and local recording with no mandatory monthly fee. If the numbers are what you need first, the Los Angeles CCTV cost guide publishes our bands and the cost calculator gives you a starting range.
There is no per-stall rule, and any bid quoting one is pricing hardware rather than designing a system. The count follows the zones and the pinch points. The worked 150-stall, two-level structure in this guide lands at 23 cameras: four on the entry and exit lanes (an overview and a dedicated plate camera each way), six in the drive aisles, four across the bays, two at elevator lobbies, two at stair doors, two at pedestrian openings, and one each at the EV chargers, the pay station and the recorder-room door. A single-level surface lot with one entrance commonly lands at 8 to 12.
Because the lights are almost certainly meeting the code, and the code is very dim. Los Angeles Municipal Code § 91.6305.1 requires a parking garage serving dwelling units or guest rooms to provide a minimum average surface illumination of 0.2 footcandles (2.15 lux) at floor level. ASIS International's Protection of Assets manual puts adequate security lighting in a parking structure at about 5 footcandles with a 4:1 average-to-minimum ratio. A garage can be fully compliant and still be roughly twenty-five times darker than the level at which cameras work normally.
Almost never, and this is the most common design mistake in parking CCTV. The two jobs need opposite settings: the overview wants a wide field of view and enough exposure to see a face inside a car, while the plate camera wants a tight field of view and a fast shutter to freeze a moving, retroreflective plate. The arithmetic decides it. A 1,920-pixel camera framed 15 feet wide puts about 128 pixels on a 12-inch plate and works; framed 30 feet wide to catch both lanes it manages about 64 and will not read reliably. Budget two cameras per lane.
No general city mandate requires cameras in a parking garage. LAMC § 91.6305 requires light, not video. Where a camera obligation is real it comes from somewhere specific: a conditional-use grant on the parcel, a lender or insurer, a franchise or brand standard, an employer's own workplace violence prevention plan, or the rules governing a particular tenant's business. Read your own entitlement and your own policy before accepting anyone's claim about what the city requires.
Usually not, and it is physics rather than a product defect. Reinforced concrete attenuates radio badly, which is why your phone loses signal on P2. Wi-Fi cameras drop links between levels and cloud-only cameras go offline. Plan for wired cameras, a recorder on site in a locked room, and the cloud for remote viewing rather than as the only copy of your evidence. Ethernet is limited to 100 metres (328 feet) per run, so a large structure needs intermediate enclosures with fibre.
Long enough to survive the reporting delay, which in a garage is longer than owners expect. A resident who parks Friday night and finds the glass on Monday morning has already burned three days, and an insurer or an attorney may not ask for weeks. Thirty days is the practical floor; sixty is a better target where budget allows, and some tenants and permits impose their own longer figure. Storage is the constraint, and it is arithmetic rather than a guess.
Price bands, what drives them, and how to compare bids on identical scope.
Read the cost guideCamera counts, placement and privacy limits in an LA multifamily property.
Read the guideThe walk-the-site method that turns a floor plan into a camera schedule.
Open the checklistRetention, storage arithmetic and what insurers and permits actually ask for.
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