PARKING ANALYSIS OF SADDAR AREA IN RAWALPINDI

Abstract

The project ‘Parking Management for Saddar Rawalpindi’ was carried out to learn the methodology of analysis and mitigation of parking problems in a Central Business District. The growing population demands of roads and traffic structures. Over a period of about 8 to 10 years there has been a lot of development in Rawalpindi Saddar. This is mainly because of construction of new business Centers and shopping malls that have further worsened the traffic and parking situation in Saddar. A pragmatic approach and chronological methodology was followed to deal with the CBD under study. It was identified that the major reason for the traffic congestion in CBD was insufficient parking spaces during rush hours. The area was divided into four zones for simplicity. Parking conditions were observed in each zone and measurements were taken for each road present in those zones. The measurements along with international standards aided in calculating the existing on-street and off-street capacity of Saddar. Moreover, in order to find out the parking demand in Saddar, the businesses in all zones were divided into seven categories. Total number of shops for each category was noted and then surveyed accordingly. Two types of surveys were carried out i.e Business Owner Survey and General Public Survey. Analsysis of the results obtained from these surveys paved a way to understand the reaslistic approach involved in calculating the demand. Various results such as Passenger factor, multi-category factor, timing schedule were extracted from the analysis. After the application of rotaion factor on demand, it was compared with the existing capacity of Saddar. Just as anticipated, the demand exceeded the capacity and there was a requirement to accommodate the excess parkings. The solution proposed for this problem was the construction of parking structures in Saddar at empty spaces that are not being utilized properly. It was observed that due to limitation of empty spaces available, 4 plazas could be provided all together in all zones. Capacities for each plaza were calculated. Then difference between excessive demand and capacity of each floor in palza was determined. Through this number of floors in each parking palza was determined for current and forecasted years.