Dubai: With expansion, more areas in Dubai are being converted into paid parking zones. Al Qusais 1 and some parts of Muhaisnah will be added to the Roads and Transport Authority’s (RTA) paid-parking network next month.

The addition is expected to ease problems for motorists searching for parking spaces in areas of high demand.

“There is a parking master plan developed in line with the development of Dubai’s areas and paid-parking zones are expanded accordingly. The RTA regularly studies and analyses the requirements of various neighbourhoods to determine if it needs to be under parking control or not,” said Adel Al Marzouqi, the RTA’s Director of Parking, explaining the criteria for expansion.

“The areas in focus are mixed-use residential and commercial neighbourhoods. Residents are not affected by our expansion plans as according to Dubai Municipality standards all buildings should have internal parking for residents. Our aim of controlling such areas is to increase parking turnover and increase parking availability for visitors,” he added.

The development comes close on the heels of a similar expansion in the Greens area last month, when most of the residential neighbourhood was converted into a paid-parking zone.

Paid parking was also introduced recently in some portions of Al Badaa, Al Quoz and Al Sufouh.

In another development, the RTA is planning to cover the Tecom district, formerly known as Tecom Area C, into a paid-parking zone, by early next year.

“Tecom district currently faces severe parking problems and the Tecom management has approached us to study the implementation of paid-parking systems in areas similar to the way we did at Dubai Media City and Knowledge Village last year,” said Al Marzouqi.

However, Tecom management has denied any plans to implement a parking management system.

“We have no existing plan, nor made any decision, to implement a new parking management system across all of Tecom’s business parks,” Tecom management said in a statement.

Currently, Dubai has 556,853 parking slots, out of which 114,827 are paid-parking slots.

The paid-parking system covers as many as 70 communities, almost 60 per cent of the city, and is controlled by 3,916 parking meters.

The paid-parking zones are divided into 69 A parking zones, which are on-street or roadside parking slots. And there are also 32 B parking zones, which are off-street or big parking lots.

The RTA recently released a smart parking app, which has many new features. The new app allows users to create a new parking account and top-up using their mPay account or direct top-up via credit card.

“The users can use this app to purchase parking tickets by paying the 30 fils extra charged for mParking. The system also allows all UAE plate holders to purchase parking tickets without registration and the parking zones are automatically detected based on the location of the user,” said Al Marzouqi.

In another first for the region, the RTA also installed parking sensors on a portion of Shaikh Zayed Road that will help motorists determine where there is a parking slot available or not.