A good parking lot design practice is as much an art as it is science. The design of larger parking lots is often a tedious and highly iterative process. Further, in most situations, the stall count for a parking facility is never fully known until the final layout is actually completed. Over the years’ parking lot designers have migrated from rough hand sketching to using CAD blocks to layout parking concepts. For several years now, CAD applications have played a major role in advancing, simplifying, and developing cost-effective transportation design practices. This technical paper describes an innovative approach to designing parking lots and the benefits that one can derive especially when dealing with larger projects. This new approach takes advantage of the inherent power of CAD to semi-automatically develop parking layouts in considerably less time and with potentially more accuracy than other traditional design methods. The proposed approach comprises of: Applying predefined parking layout dimension standards to application design parameters based on turnover and user characteristics Automatically generating layout options with various stall configurations, stall sizes, and circulation patterns founded on predefined layout construction lines and physical parking lot constraints Using intelligent parking lot objects where the application provides an instant stall tally allowing for more effective evaluation of layout alternatives Because the application develops parking modules instantaneously, changes to the “predefined layout construction lines” means changes to the parking lot can be made just as quickly. This new design approach demonstrates similar benefits to parking lot designers that roadway and other civil designers have benefited from – those being the ability of producing comprehensive parking layout options quickly and accurately.
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