Public Parking Lots Positioning for Traffic Management using AHP Model (Case Study: District One Shiraz City)

Growing urban development causes many problems in metropolitans such as increased traffic, air and noise pollution, congestion, lack of parking places for cars, especially in city centers, and this problem will affect most cities. Public parking lots are one of the major infrastructures of urban transportation system, which play a crucial role in reducing onstreet parking and traffic congestion. After selecting the study area, this study specified 20 effective criteria in positioning parking lots using experts’ opinions. A questionnaire was then prepared for the criteria effective in parking lots positioning. Finally, 11 criteria were applied to tackle the research. The AHP method was employed for weighting the selected criteria. To perform spatial analysis, the weights were applied to the layers made using the criteria on GIS. Quite suitable, suitable, unsuitable, and quite unsuitable places were specified for building parking lots within the study area using the overlay method. Statistical and library resources, detailed design drawings, and their statistics were used for data gathering. Research results showed that the parameters effective in parking lot positioning include three major criteria of anatomic-physical, socioeconomic, and access criteria and each consists of several sub-criteria. Land use criterion with the final weight of 0.24 and land area criterion with the final weight of 0.02 were recognized respectively as the major and minor criteria for positioning public parking lots. Finally, seven suitable places were determined after studying appropriate places in terms of mode of ownership. As the criteria effective in public parking lots positioning were determined with respect to different factors and the use of experts’ opinions and the criteria were analyzed using the conventional positioning method (the AHP method), this method could be recommended as an appropriate model for similar studies, especially on metropolises.