Motorists heading to Souq Waqif and the Cultural Village Foundation-Katara — two of the most visited tourist hubs in Qatar — and the Doha Exhibition and Convention Center () will now find it easy to get parking space for their cars with the recently upgraded Masarak iTraffic app which shows the availability of parking slots.
With the increasing number of cars, parking has been a challenge and the smart parking feature of the app is seen as an immediate solution since providing the motorist information on the parking lots with available parking spaces will help avoid wasting time as well as decongest traffic. Five parking areas are currently included in the app, three of which are adjacent to Souq Waqif.
“The connected parking lots include Al Ahmed parking, Al Shioukh parking, Souq Waqif north underground parking, the DECC parking and recently the Katara Cultural Village underground parking,” said Dr Hamid Menouar, Product Manager-R&D expert at Qatar Mobility Innovations Center (QMIC), who was speaking at the opening of the second Smart Parking Qatar Conference at The Intercontinental Hotel The City yesterday.
The app, which can be downloaded for free for Android and iOS, was developed by QMIC in partnership with the Ministry of Municipality and Urban Planning (MMUP). Available in English and Arabic, the app was initially launched mainly to give users an overview of the traffic conditions in Qatar, in real-time, and help them navigate using the shortest and fastest routes to their destinations.
Delivering a keynote on “ The future of smart parking technology in Qatar”, Menouar advocated the need to optimize the existing parking infrastructure of the country rather than build more parking spaces which is a waste of space and money.
“What are the immediate needs in Qatar? Do we need more parking spaces? Or do we need to optimize the parking infrastructure that we have?” he asks.
“One immediate solution is to have high level overview. We have started optimizing this through the Masarak-iTraffic by starting to provide parking information. This is a solution already deployed and ready to expand to include more areas in the future,” he said.
Rashed Taleb Al Nabit, Assistant Undersecretary for Land Transport in the Ministry of Transport and Communications delivered the opening keynote in which he announced that the Ministry is currently undertaking several initiatives to implement Geographic Information Systems and smart applications which would assist all relevant entities in the country in terms of future parking plans, in addition to projects related to the National Road Safety Strategy. The Ministry has also recently launched several projects for the planning and development of road networks and means to support this development, including Qatar Parking Master Plan.
The opening day of the two-day conference also featured presentations such as: “The Importance of safety in parking and requirements” by Brig. Mohamed Al Malki, General Secretary of the National Traffic Safety Committee, “Parking strategies around major sports venues in Qatar” by Moen Azimi from Arab Engineering Bureau, and a panel discussion on the “successful parking strategies and technologies for Qatar,” among others.
