Video: Egypt’s Cabinet reviews ‘1st smart parking in Middle East’

CAIRO – 15 November 2018: The Egyptian Cabinet published a video showing the first phase of the “first smart parking in the Middle East” in Heliopolis’s Korba district, Cairo.

Maged Zarif, the operating manager of the Roxy Garage, said that the parking is the largest in the Middle East in terms of area and is the world’s largest garage regarding capacity as it can accommodate as many as 1,700 vehicles. The first phase will accommodate 900 cars, Zarif added.

The Roxy Garage consists of four underground floors with an area of 10,000 square meters each, he said.

The parking operates automatically without human interference, Zarif said. Clients will put their cars inside elevators for parking and then use smart cards to restore them, he explained, adding that each of the two operations does not take more than three minutes.

Ebrahim Saber, deputy Cairo governor, said that the first phase of the Roxy Garage has been completed and is ready to operate, revealing that the current expense of the parking amounts to LE 230 million ($12.8 million).

The Roxy Garage is part of the government’s plan to resolve traffic congestion, especially that Korba is one of Egypt’s most crowded areas.

According to a study published by the World Bank in 2013 titled “Cairo Traffic Congestion", traffic congestion costs Egypt LE 50 billion ($8 billion) a year, which is four percent of Egypt’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

This loss is caused by the productivity wasted when citizens spend most of their time held up in traffic rather than at work, the fuel wasted and the pollution caused by vehicle emissions.