Selma Roth

Saudi Gazette

 

JEDDAH — The lack of parking lots for shops, hospitals, and businesses are causing major traffic jams throughout the coastal city.



Inhabitants often complain about the rise of public buildings and businesses along crowded roads without providing adequate parking facilities. As a result, roads get blocked with double parked cars or people waiting for a free spot, and motorists block other people’s vehicles, who then have to wait or find the owner inside the shop or restaurant.



Umm Bander experienced this just a few days ago. Coming out of a shopping mall along Jeddah Corniche when it closed for Maghreb prayer, she found her car blocked by another car and had to wait 30 minutes until the owner came out of the mosque.



“He left the mosque much later than everyone else – all shops had already opened again,” the 44-year-old mother of three said.



Remembering the incident made her blood boil again. “I asked him if it was his car and he said, ‘No, it’s my wife’s,” as if that took away his responsibility for the way it was parked.



When she confronted him with the fact that she had been waiting for half an hour, his only reply was that he had to pray.



“He didn’t feel at all like he had done anything wrong,” Umm Bander said, adding that his wife, who stood next to him, did not say anything either.



Saad Khan, a 25-year-old office administrator at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), said almost everywhere he goes there is no parking available. “And if there is, it is taken up […] in a matter of seconds. Often, I end up being cursed if by mistake I park at a place where someone else was eyeing before me or at the same time as me.”



As a result, Khan avoids certain roads, such as Falesteen Street and Tahlia “because they are always blocked by double, triple parking.”



However, if the problem occurs right under the building you live in, it is impossible to evade it: “Under my building on Prince Majed Street, [restaurant customers] often park and forget” about their car.



The problem is that the restaurants near his home in Aziziyah District do not provide enough parking spaces.



“So we just have to park far away from our apartment and carry goods, gas cylinders, and stuff like that all the way,” he sighed.



According to Ko Mies, a civil engineer from the Netherlands working for an international retail company in Jeddah, a number of factors contribute to the parking crisis.



First of all, the laws regulating parking areas are not implemented consistently.



“The authorities leave it up to the developers to decide on the required area designated to parking lots, but the latter often don’t take this into account in their designs, while investors or shop owners are not involved in the issue of parking.”



He said the company he works for studies the market, the size of its branches, as well as the habits of local customers before building a store and adjacent parking spaces, but many businesses lack the experience and benchmark figures needed to decide on the required number of parking lots.



As a result, authorities and businesses sometimes look at benchmark figures from other, more or less similar countries, such as Dubai or the United States, but these may be irrelevant to the local situation.



“Are people coming by car to your shop or is there a good public transport connection, how long do people stay at your shop, and are people coming alone by car or in big groups are all questions that should be taken into account when designing a shopping area,” Mies said.



Another problem, he continued, is the lack of land-use planning or “zoning,” a practice of designating specific areas for use or development as a particular zone in planning.



In most developed countries, zoning regulates the use of land, and the surrounding infrastructure will be designed to support the need of a specific zone.



As such, an area that has been zoned for retail needs to be accessible for a large number of vehicles and provide sufficient parking lots.



In Jeddah, zones easily change from shops to restaurants or other businesses, which all have totally different requirements when it comes to parking spaces. “In shops, traffic is usually spread out over the days, and people do not stay long; restaurants, on the other hand, have clear peak hours and people tend to stay for much longer,” he said to illustrate the various needs for parking spaces according to the use of land.



Take, for instance, the Rawdah Star Complex located on Rawdah Street. The square, with some 15 restaurants, offers at most three parking lots per restaurant. How could the authorities grant all those restaurants licenses to open, Mies wondered, and why do businesses even consider establishing there?



Even when there are regulations, they are very lenient. Saudi Gazette did not succeed in obtaining recent numbers, but in June 2009, Jeddah Municipality announced the following rules for parking areas: a minimum of 150 square meters for a residential complex, and 70 square meters for office car parks.



Wholesale and retail business buildings should have 50 to 60 square meter parking areas, and souqs and supermarkets 35 square meters, Abid Al-Jadaani, director general of the Building Regulations Department at the municipality, told Arab News at that time.



A simple calculation provides us with the number of cars that can actually be parked in those areas. Given that parking lots have an average width of 2.53 meters and length of 4.35 meters, the area needed for one parking space is 11 square meters on average (and that is not even for parallel parking spaces, which require an average of 16.8 square meters per parking).



That means a 150-square-meter-parking area for a residential complex can hardly accommodate 11 cars, taking into account that you also need space between the lots.



Most buildings nowadays contain 16 apartments in addition to a penthouse, meaning at least 17, but most probably 34 cars.



The same goes for office car parks. How many offices have only six employees? And how many souqs and supermarkets have only three customers at a time?



Naturally, Jeddah is not the only town facing parking problems. In a world dominated by cars, parking lots are scarce and often difficult to find. As a result, in many countries authorities try to discourage the use of cars and increase parking space turnover rates in crowded areas by introducing parking fees.



Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz International Airport implemented this successfully, but other areas have not followed yet.



An additional, looming challenge is the growth rate of cars in the city. With a young population like Saudi Arabia’s, where 50 percent is under 25 years, the number of cars is growing exponentially.



In the absence of feasible alternatives, parking – and traffic in general – is likely to become an ever growing problem in the Kingdom.



The authorities must be aware of this, but grant nevertheless licenses in areas that are already very dense, such as Tahlia Street, Mies pointed out. On that street, directly east from Madinah Road, a giant shopping mall is currently being built, while the area already suffers heavily from traffic congestion, especially in the evenings and on the weekends.



Mies calls the phase the Kingdom currently is in a “pioneering phase.” Coming into existence only eight decades ago, the country cannot be compared to much older countries in the world.



And while it can learn from other young countries such as the United Arab Emirates, their solutions cannot be copy-pasted blindly, as every country’s situation is different.