Three styles, and roughly a factor of two and a half between them
A shared single line puts one stripe on the boundary between two stalls. A hundred and twenty stalls in six rows need 120 shared lines plus six more to close the far end of each row, so 126 lines rather than 240. At 18 ft that is 2,268 ft. The same lot in double stripes is 240 lines, 4,320 ft, before anything else goes on the ground. Hairpin adds the short head across each pair, which is small in footage and large in how the lot reads from a car.
The reason retail lots almost all use double or hairpin is not paint. It is that a driver aiming at a single line has to guess which side of it to take, and gets it wrong often enough that the row drifts. A hairpin removes the guess. Whether that is worth twice the stripe is a decision about the site, not a calculation.
Passes are the thing people forget
A specification asking for a 6 in line and a gun set up to lay 4 in means every foot of that line gets walked twice. The footage on the drawing does not change; the distance the crew covers does, and so does the paint. If the specification and the tip do not match, the mismatch shows up as a day that runs long for no reason anybody can name afterwards.
Setup usually beats the line
With the defaults here, laying the line takes about forty minutes and setting up the rows takes forty-eight. That ratio surprises people, and it is the reason a repaint over legible existing lines is a fraction of the cost of a fresh layout on a bare lot: everything in the setup column collapses, because the layout is already on the ground. Zeroing the layout hours and dropping the per-row setup to a couple of minutes is how you model a straight repaint.
Why crosswalk bars are counted separately
A 12 in bar carries three times the paint of a 4 in stall line per foot, so folding it into a linear-foot total at the stall-line width understates the material by a factor of three on that part of the work. They are counted in square feet instead, and walked at their own pass count. The same argument applies to any wide marking on the plan, and the other-line field is the place to put a narrow one.
Questions people ask
How many linear feet of striping is a parking stall?
Between about 18 and 45, depending on style. A shared single line is one 18 ft stripe per stall plus one to close each row. Double is two, so 36. Hairpin is two plus a short head. Arrows, hatching, stencils and crosswalks then sit on top and on a small lot they can be a third of the total.
Does this work out how much paint I need?
No, on purpose. It gives you the marking area in square feet, which is the geometry half and is knowable. Gallons are that area divided by the coverage of the specific paint on the specific surface, and coverage on fresh sealer against open oxidised asphalt differs by roughly a factor of two. That number belongs to the data sheet and to your own experience of the surface.
Why is my line wider than one striper pass a problem?
Because the crew walks the whole footage again. A 6 in specification laid by a 4 in tip is two passes over every foot of line, which doubles both the walking time and the paint on that work. Either change the tip or price the second pass.
How long does it take to stripe a parking lot?
For the defaults here, about two and a half hours on site for 120 stalls with two people, of which the actual line laying is around forty minutes. Setup, chalking and layout are the rest. Those three are where the variation is, and they are the fields worth replacing with your own timings.
What is not in the cost figure?
Paint, beads, thinner, stencil hire, cones and traffic control, mobilisation, surface cleaning, and any margin. It is the crew hours times the rate you entered and nothing else. The bid comparison shows what is left after the crew, which is the money all of those have to come out of.