Towards an Urban Solution – Semi Automated Car Parking in Doha, Qatar

In light of the increasing number of vehicles in urban and semi-urban cities, the need to provide adequate car parking is becoming more essential in order to accommodate the increase number of vehicles (1). Due to the increasing price in land, providing a traditional car parking solution is not practical nor feasible, therefore, designers had to articulate different behaviors and more efficient solutions to this issue. On the other hand, providing an adequate car parking is always a major obstacle in any project, thus, in most cases, the final outcome of the design is insufficient car parking spots to the bare minimum of the equirement. In most countries, the legislation or design code for commercial or residential buildings provides minimum car parking spaces with minimum spaces for visitors or deliveries, and if provided, usually the parking spaces are insufficient. This is comprehensible due to the high cost of land and construction. However, some elite developers market the extra car park as their selling point for their developments or even offer the additional car park for sale when required. Nevertheless, this does not resolve the problem of inadequate car park, on the contrary, it complicates the matter. This paper will discuss the solution provided for a commercial building in Qatar – Doha while providing a semi-automated car parking system in order to resolve the insufficient number of car parking provided. The commercial building is located in old Doha downtown where the building was constructed more than 20 years ago, and the legislations by then were less stringent. The initial solution provided by the developer was to use the neighboring land as a car park for the tenants, thus, this was still Page 2 of 15 insufficient. For most tenants, having an allocated car parking is a must to have in addition of providing visitors car park. This will make the commercial spaces attractive for tenants and users especially when there isn’t public transportation connected with the development.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].

This work did not receive any external funding.