Public Parking Site Selection using GIS

Vahid Karimi
Email: vahid_karimi_2000@yahoo.com



Nowadays by the increase of the population, most of big cities suffer from the lack of public car parking spaces. Public parking spaces as one of the important components of a modern urban transportation system, plays an important role in decreasing the load of heavy traffic.
Suitable site selection for public parking spaces not only increases the parking efficiency, but it also decreases marginal car parking and indirectly results in increase of streets' width and traffic fluency. At the moment in most of iranian cities, public parking site selection is carried out using traditional methods or just visiting the site. In traditional method, considering all of the effective parameters in site selection is almost impossible, and usually, it is carried out by just considering some limited factors like land price. Therefore, this causes the selected site for parking construction to fall in area so far from tourist attractive centers, far from crowded streets, and heavy traffic in city.
Geographic Information System, as a science and technology of analysis of spatial and attribute data, is an efficient tool to find optimum location for public parking. In this field of study, use of GIS results in decrease of field visit and increase of accuracy and reliability of the work. In this paper, we introduce an optimum method for parking site selection using GIS considering almost all of the effective parameters simultaneously.
Effective factors are considered from two main points of view including parking efficiency and the problem of providing required land for construction particularly in city central regions. Based on these points of view, conceptual model of parking site selection is presented. Pilot project for this study was one of the traffic regions of Shiraz city located in south part of Iran. Various methods of integrating data layers in GIS such as index overlay, fuzzy logic were used for parking site selection and the results were compared and evaluated. Finally, suitable method for public parking site selection is presented.