Parking

Well, its my last day in the Emirates, apart from the three hours I'll be at the Dubai airport. UAE really has an air of un-reality to it, a modern day Casablanca. Who really understands it? Most Americans fear it, when I tell people I'm flying to Abu Dhabi, the first question is: where is it? and the second: oh, isn't that dangerous? It helps to explain why there are so many British here compared to Americans, apart from the colonization aspect. 

There's a lot of problems here to be sure: the urban planning situation in regard to cars is verging on catastrophic. In Abu Dhabi, there is a critical shortage of parking spaces, so people line their cars up and park them single file in the middle of the road, creating two narrow one way streets on either side. Many double-park. One of the sources of this problem was the requirement that only buildings above 20 floors had to have a parking garage. There doesn't seem to be ANY minimum parking requirements. So, investors and developers only built  buildings right to 20 floors to skimp out on the expense of a parking garage. It's a huge problem, that I've seen get noticably worse since I was here a year ago. It's only going to get worse as well, with the population still exploding, and more people buying cars. The only real solution is to either demolish some of the old buildings to build huge parking garages, or to limit street access to zones like in Singapore.