Layout parking using Vehicle Tracking

Parking layout is crucial to a well-planned commercial, educational and healthcare development. In fact, the parking count typically decides how large your building can be. We can now layout parking in minutes, get up-to-date parking counts and perform swept path analysis all inside Autodesk Vehicle Tracking.

In this example, we’ll be using the "Vehicle Tracking" add-on in Civil 3D. The "Vehicle Tracking" tab should appear on your ribbon. In this first session, we’ll look at laying out parking using Autodesk Vehicle Tracking. It’s much more than swept path analysis! In this tutorial, we’ll focus on the "Parking" panel of Vehicle Tracking – more specifically designing and laying out parking rows and parallel rows as well as running reports.

Here's how:

1. We want to maximize our parking stalls in this example, select the "New Row" button in the "Parking" panel and then select "New Row" from the drop-down menu.
   
   
   
   
2. A window titled “Parking Standard Explorer” will appear. Select “U.S. Parking Standards” and then “ITE Guidelines for Parking Facility Location and Design”.
   
   
   
   
3. Click “Proceed”.
4. Name the “Parking Standard”. (Or you can leave it as the default name.) Select “OK”.
5. A window titled “Drawing Settings” will pop up with scale settings. We’re going to leave the default settings and select “OK”.
6. The “Parking Row Properties” window will appear. Add a title, select a bay alignment and modify other settings as you would like. For our example, we’re sticking with the first two bay alignment and end detail options.
   
   
   
   
7. Under “Bay Details”, we’re going to select “Left only”. We’re going to keep the settings as they are.
8. Click on the area of the drawing you want to place your parking lot and drag it out to where you need it. You can continue from here and add more stalls at different angles. We’re just going to keep this row and hit “Enter”.
   
   
   
   We can do a lot here with grips such as:
   • Change the direction of the row.
     
     
     
     
   • Adjust the vertex curve.
     
     
     
     
     
     
   • Adjust the Island Angle.
     
     
     
     
     
     
   • Add additional bays.
     
     
     
     
   • Add a vertex and add more stalls at an angle.
     
     
     
     
   • Extend a row.
   • Move a row.
   • Change angle.
9. The “Parking Report” tool will help tell us how many stalls we have so far.
   
   
   
   
   • Our parking row in this example is currently set at 90*. Selecting the “Parking Report” will tell us we currently have 27 parking stalls.
     
     
     
     
   • If we adjust the bay angle and check the Parking Report again, we’ll see we have only 23 stalls. This tools helps you decide which bay angle will give you the most parking spaces.
     
     
     
     
10. Back to our parking lot design, we want to add parallel rows to our new row. In the “New Row” tool, select “Parallel Row”.
11. In the “Parking Standard Explorer” window, select “Pool” and click on the previous parking standard we used before. Click “Proceed”.
    
    
    
    
12. When the “Parking Row Properties” window appears, select “Both” and click “Close”.
    
    
    
    
13. Select your first row and add in your parallel row.
14. This icon will give you the option to have stalls on one (by hovering on either side) or both sides (by hovering over the middle) of the row.
    
    
    
    
    
    
15. Add additional parallel rows until you get the edge of your lot.
    
    
    
    
16. You can extend the rows and bays to fit your lot by using the grips at the ends of the rows.
    
    
    
    

In the case that you want to add the last row as a singular row along the outside of the lot, do the following:

1. Add a new row and grab the parking standards from the pool as we did in step 11.
2. Select “Right only” from the Parking Row Properties and click “Close”.
3. Start the row at the top of the lot and drag it down, creating end points at the curves. Hit “Enter”.
   
   
   
   
4. Part of our new row is on a curve, so use the “Adjust vertex curve” tool to align it with the curve and hit “Enter”. This will also get rid of unnecessary bays on that curve.
   
   
   
   

It’s as simple as that! By using these simple tools, you’re able to maximize your parking layouts and save time.