Parking Lot Site Selection: An Opening Gate Towards Sustainable GIS-based Urban Traffic Management

Mismatch between urban development and public parking lots have caused problems in transportation systems and urban traffic so that occupied passages by on-street stopping disrupt smoothing traffic flow. This makes it inevitable to increase the capacity of passages and to devote more space to off-street parking spots. The present study aims at finding the most suitable sites for public parking lots in one of the most crowded cities of western Iran. Before the site selection process is getting started, the area required for construction of new parking lots was estimated using Parking Generation Method. Afterwards, site selection criteria including "distance from travel absorber centers", "distance from passages", "the cost of real estate", and "suitable land uses for parking lots" were determined while "unsuitable land uses for public parking spaces" such as historical monuments were recognized as a constraint factor and excluded from being further analyzed. The selected criteria were then weighted using pair wise comparisons. The map layers were finally overlaid once by Boolean Method. Since the selected spots on the output map had not adequate distribution throughout the study area, the overlaying was done once again by fuzzy Ordered Weighted Average (OWA) by which a total number of four spots were recognized suitable for public parking lots in the city.