Thursday, October 05, 2006

Cost control or bad planning?

I've complained about it before, the incompetence of so many planners employed to design the new Dubai.

They keep getting it wrong. Totally wrong. Too often.

Who are these people? Why can't they get even the basics right?

There's an article this morning on Page 4 of Emirates Today (sorry, since they changed their site I can't work out how to link direct to the article) which highlights the problem at the Free Zone business estate. There's a crackdown it seems, with warnings & fines for 'improper parking'.

On several occassions I've simply given up trying to park at Internet City and driven away.

Now I'm not a trained planner but I can work out out that if you build a very large business estate with dozens of buildings, hundreds of companies, thousands of employees and hundreds of visitors...you'll need to provide adequate parking.

You're building the business estate from nothing, so you could stipulate that every building must have a basement car park with several spaces for each office. Outside general car parks could be provided for overflow and for visitors.

Internet City/Media City/ Knowledge Village is that business estate. Parking isn't even adequate for the people who work there, let alone any visitors. That means the planners badly underestimated the number of vehicles.

There's only one other possibility. It wasn't the planners' fault - to keep costs down it was a deliberate policy not to have underground parking in the individual buildings. If that's the case it was an appallingly bad business decision.

5 comments:

moryarti said...

my bet would be on bad planning

secretdubai said...

From the horse's mouth:

"We didn't realise so many peope would drive to work."

trailingspouse said...

How did they think they would get there . . . by pogo stick?

And it's not just commercial buildings - can you imagine what the Marina will be like when all the people with two cars move into apartments with only one parking space?

Keef said...

I've bitched and moaned about this ever since moving into Media City 4 or 5 years ago. I was told that parking provision was to 'international standards'. I pointed out that in other cities you have public transport that works, so that people are not compelled to drive to their office.

The current line from TECOM management is that they have built a huge multi-storey car park in DMC Phase 2. Marvellous. But for at least six months of the year it is too damn hot to park there and then walk to any but the closest buildings.

Elle said...

I think there is a lack of parking/planning in all 7 of the Emirates! Some worse than others.