Type: Parking Studies
Project Name: The Lagoons Business Pearl (Pearl B)
City: Dubai
State: United Arab Emirates
Client: Parsons Corporation

Features: 2,765 apartments, 1,741,480 square feet of retail, 15,608,630 square feet of commercial office, 4,442 hotel rooms, 340 students private school

Description: DESMAN was retained by Parsons Corporation to provide conceptual planning, and design services associated with the development of a seven-level 30,000 space parking structure and commercial vehicle docking zones within a podium structure on a manmade island. This island, called Pearl B, will be created to form part of The Lagoons project that is being developed by Sama Dubai. The Lagoons is located at the basin of Dubai Creek and will only be accessible via four bridges.

Many of the buildings will be over 50 stories in height. This very dense development program will be constructed on approximately 111 acres. In comparison the Chicago Loop contains approximately 154 acres.

The original plans for the parking structure within the podium called for very steep ramps that could not adequately accommodate the number of projected vehicle trips for the proposed number of parking spaces.

Of the many challenges that DESMAN addressed was the need to provide express ramps to all parking levels of the podium directly from three of the four bridges. This was required because the levels of peak hour traffic were so high that the planned surface street system could not accommodate all the projected vehicle trips. Working with Parsons’ engineers DESMAN conceived of a plan that provided a flat floor one-way ring road around a central core that can be entered from down ramps on its outside and can be exited to up ramps on its inside. The express up and down ramps were designed so that they would stack in the same volume of space thereby maximizing the amount of flat floor space that would be available for parking. Five secondary ramp systems were also developed that would allow floor-floor access from the surface level through the lowest level. These secondary ramps were proposed as double circular helixes with access to an outer ring road system.

The island is elliptical in shape and as such the parking bays were recommended to be designed in a radial pattern that follows the circumference of the island’s shape between the podium’s inner ring road and the edge of the parking structure. Inside the inner ring road the parking bays were recommended to be parallel to the shorter axis of the island and allowed for sloping floor ramps to serve the lowest levels of parking between levels P5 and P7. A 9 meter by 18 meter column grid system was chosen outside of building footprints to allow for clear span parking and enhanced vehicle circulation and visibility.

DESMAN also made recommendations with respect to traffic access that resulted in enhanced access for commercial vehicle traffic to and from the local road system surrounding the island and also recommended a traffic management plan that would preclude cut-through traffic from an adjacent island.

Currently DESMAN is addressing commercial vehicle servicing issues.