Parking layout has two sides. One is regulatory: dimensions, clearances, ramps and safety, which your designer and the applicable norms decide. The other is commercial: those same decisions determine what the car park earns for years afterwards. This guide is about the second.
Bay dimensions, aisle widths, ramp gradients and fire requirements are set by the applicable norms and by your designer. We do not design car parks and we do not offer those figures here. What we can tell you is the commercial consequence of the choices you make while designing.
Fitting the maximum number of bays feels right, but a tight aisle slows movement, makes manoeuvring harder and raises the risk of damage. A car park where taking a bay needs two manoeuvres fills less readily than one where a single manoeuvre does. Sacrificing a few bays often produces higher real occupancy.
Bays near the entrance, the lift or the exit are worth more to a driver than the back row of a distant floor. If those zones are separable in the plan, selling them at their own price becomes possible later. If everything is laid out as one indivisible space, that option is gone for good.
Bay count sets your capacity; the throughput of the entrance and exit sets your turnover. If a large facility depends on a single lane, the queue reaches the street at peak and some drivers simply leave. That is lost revenue directly, and no number of bays compensates for it.
Can you assign one floor to tenants and open the rest to the public? Can you close a zone temporarily for an event? Can you separate long stays from short ones physically, so they do not slow each other's turnover? These questions cost almost nothing to solve on the drawing and a great deal to solve after construction.
How many bays are lost if the aisle is widened, and how much easier manoeuvring becomes. How many cars per hour can pass through the entrance as drawn, at peak. Which zones can be closed or opened independently. And what the layout looks like when the facility is 90% full, rather than when it is empty.