It is common to see cars parked in the middle of the road blocking traffic here. But try this anywhere else in the world, and your car will be towed away in seconds. Because the parking problem has not been seriously addressed in the Kingdom despite tens of thousands of vehicles roaming the streets everyday, the question remains: “What will happen to parking as the population continues to expand?” One solution might be more biking, carpooling, walking, and use of public transit. But not in Saudi Arabia, many have said. Government offices, especially those in rented buildings like the Jeddah Passports Department and the Jeddah Civil Status Department, are major violators of parking standards. If you are a visitor of either department, you have the choice of blocking the parked car of a fellow motorist or of wasting a lot of time waiting for a parking space to become available. But you are not alone. Employees at some government departments have complained about parking spaces. Yes, parking is free at those public places, but it comes with the high cost of your time and patience. The problem is only going to get worse, especially with the increase in auto sales in the Kingdom, estimated at 20 percent in 2008. “Government departments with parking spaces allocate the spaces to their employees and people are left to look for parking spaces,” Muhammad Al-Shareef, a social and economic analyst, said. The problem is compounded with government offices in rented buildings, like the Civil Status Department in Naseem District in Jeddah, which do not provide courteous and efficient service to their visitors when it comes to parking spaces, he said. The problem is especially bad in government offices located in rented buildings in densely populated areas with many businesses around, he said. Storeowners complain that would-be customers cannot park, and residents without their own driveways resent the fact that nothing has been done about the parking problem. Even when parking spaces are provided at government offices, they are not covered, he said, depriving the motorist of the right to a cool car seat after visiting the office, Al-Shareef said. The culture of unorganized parking has badly affected the Kingdom, and government offices, such as, the court, traffic departments, labor offices, and hospitals do not seem to realize the magnitude of the problem for their visitors. The problem is compounded when visitors' cars are seen parked along streets with heavy traffic, Al-Shareef said. Government offices should make parking a priority for their visitors, he said. “If an employee gives up his parking space to visitors, he will help at least five visitors to use the space as they come and go from the office,” he suggested. The government needs to organize the mechanism for parking availability at public places, he said. Bandr Al-Maliki, an expeditor of paperwork at government offices, or ‘muaqib', said he goes through the agony of finding a parking space almost everyday. “Sometimes it takes me so much time to look for a space to park that I forget where I have parked my car,” he said. Another ‘muaqib' said that he has to pay a parking fee to park his car in a parking lot near the Passports Department in Jeddah. “Two riyals an hour is a lot of money for me to pay for parking as I spend many hours inside the Passports Departments. This eats up a big chunk of my income so I have to look for a free space,” he said. Saad Al-Harthi, a frequent visitor to the Labor Office in Jeddah, said, “There really is a parking crisis.” He usually parks his car as far as 600 meters from the office, he added. Many of those government offices do not consider special cases like the elderly or the handicapped who find it difficult to walk such a great distance to the office in the scorching heat, he said. The public parking issue is a case worth investigating, said a Jeddah Municipal Council official. The council has received many complaints about the problem, said Tariq Faadaq, chairman of the Jeddah Municipal Council. There are no parking standards for many government offices, he said. The only feasible solution may be getting a taxi or a bus to drop people off at those places without having to go through the pain of looking for a space to park, he added. Contractors of large government or private projects should be forced to provide ample parking spaces for their visitors, said Hassan Al-Zahrani, deputy chairman of the Jeddah Municipal Council. The Jeddah Municipality should not approve the designs of those projects without the inclusion of enough parking spaces, he said. “It just makes sense; it is what is done in other countries,” he added. Al-Zahrani said that the visitors of any government or private office should have the right to the parking spaces, even those allocated for employees. Samer Filmban, a civil engineer, said that the population boom in Jeddah together with the huge increase in the number of vehicles has created a parking problem in the city. A solution should be found now, or else it will be much more expensive to tackle the problem later on. “If an apartment building has 100 apartments, for example, the owner should provide at least 100 parking spaces,” he said. The same should apply to grocery stores and other services, he added. And the municipality should shoulder such a responsibility, he said. The problem has been left unresolved for decades because it was not a real problem in the days when there was a much smaller population and less vehicle traffic. Now there are more than 2,500,000 privately-owned vehicles in the Kingdom. Civil engineers have thrown the blame on the municipality for ill-planning the city and for failure to enforce a parking policy on all residential units and service providers. Abdullah Al-Ghamdi, a civil engineer, said that the municipality should assign new areas for residential units with ample land to accommodate parking spaces. The city needs to expand to free people from a traffic bottleneck in the making in Jeddah, he said.
