NOTES FROM BIG BEN … Beirut isn’t Just Another Pretty Face ...Or BY PETER GUEST


architecture and bullet-riddled buildings is just a little surreal.


I About 10 years ago, I was working there for the


government and came up with a proposal to sort out the parking problems. They were not up to dealing with high-tech systems, and the coinage iswrong for parking payment. I thought that it would be a decade before they could handle technology, so I suggested a soft takeoff dealing with one problem at a time. First, deal with obstructive parking; next, show


people where they can park. Then introduce stay limits and charges using scratch cards (low-tech, easy to buy) to help make this work.While all this was happening, build some garages, funded by the parking fees, since the only modes of transport then were cars and taxis, and if you control the streets, you have to have somewhere for the cars to go if the economy isn’t going to stop. By then, they would


Tur ning pa r k ing innov a t ions into re a l i t y


RECENTLYWENT to Beirut for the first time in seven years. It’s interesting to see the city and how things are moving forward. The juxtaposition of 21st century


have a knowledge base and experience and couldmake the transition to amodern technolo- gy-based system. TheWorld Bank came in with a consultant


who had different ideas. My ideas went, and they decided to go straight to the technology option.Well, 10 years later (see above) and they have just got the meters up and running. In the local press, a government spokesman thinks they are great andmakes extensive claims about how they are revolutionizing parking in Beirut. Trouble is, they have no build-up of knowl-


edge, so it rather seems that they are being installed on a “suck it and see” basis. Main streets are controlled, but the side roads remain in a state of anarchy. Schemes are put in and then changed when they don’t quite work, and although the city has built no major off-street facilities, as far as I could understand they claim that the all-day worker parking has vanished. I wonder where? Because of the limits of the coinage, they


have had to use credit cards and stored-value cards, and this has allowed one innovation that I have long called for but never seen before.Driv- ers can pay their parking fines right at themeter.


If you get a ticket, you just go to the meter, press a few but- tons, pay the fine and the job’s done.This justmakes somuch sense for uncontested penalties that I do wonder why it does- n’t happen everywhere.


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I amthat good Why was I in Beirut?Well, an old friend had got me out


to look at a shopping mall car park that they were having problems with.This scheme has had the gestation period of a very slow elephant, and I have looked at it and doodled on various schemes forever. It has come alive again with some new investors and a new design. But they had designed a car park and just couldn’t get it to work. Anyway, the phone rang on a Thursday; Friday morning


I was on a plane to Beirut, and by Sunday afternoon, we headed off for a pizzawith three viable designs on the table. I wouldn’t say that any of them were finalized, but they were all viable. One issue that concerned everyone was the information


.


that we had about traffic flows and demand data from the investor’s big-name traffic consultants. They showed me the Traffic Impact Study, and I almost fell off my chair. This is downtown Beirut, and the consultants (I can’t use the word that I would prefer to describe them) had predicted the traffic and parking demand using ITE data. There is no questioning or caveats; these data are pre-


sented as if on tablets of stone. They use a 2010 design year for a building that is unlikely to be even built before 2012, and propose traffic mitigation that would leave most junctions in the area with a Level of Service of D, before taking account of any other developments or traffic growth post-2012.


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