Parking standards that can work in South Africa

Abstract

Paper presented at the 31st Annual Southern African Transport Conference 9-12 July 2012 "Getting Southern Africa to Work", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa.

The current South African manual for parking standards, as issued by the South African Department of Transport, was last updated in 1985. Since the dimensions of parking bays are based on data that has changed over time it is in South Africa’s best interests that the entire document be updated to meet current parking needs. The dimensions of the bays should be based on the dimensions of the vehicle population in South Africa. In response to this need, the purpose of this paper was to establish a new vehicle sales and dimension database based on data for the period 2006 - 2010. This was then used to determine a new set of parking bay dimensions, which can accommodate current vehicle sizes in South Africa. Another change since 1985 was the large increase in the use of light commercial vehicles (LCV’s) that are not only used for commercial purposes, but also as passenger cars and it was clear that provision should be made to cater for these vehicles in parking areas. The paper will show the results of the analyses of the values for the length, width and wheelbase of the representative (95th percentile) South African vehicle in parking bays.