AY1516 T2 Team Atom
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Contents
Project Objectives
Milestones & Deliverables
Timeline
Abstract
In Singapore, roads today already take up 12% of its total land area and with the limited land available. Singapore cannot afford to exhaust its land area by building more roads to accommodate vehicles and further expand the road network.
Parking space is simply the provision for the storage of vehicles. Car parks can be provided in a variety of land uses ranging from residential to shopping centers. Furthermore, car park can cause a serious impact on aesthetics whether it is on street, or in multi-storey aboveground or underground structures. These car parks consume both land and resources, that might be put to better usage in other areas, for instance, building another development or private homes.
A strategic approach to parking would connect the separate decisions of parking provision at individual sites with the achievement of wider planning goals. For instance, saving the land for other usage. A poor planning in car park would result in jams, bad traffic management and causing overspill at the surrounding areas. This is avoidable only if appropriate planning process is in placed, it helps to determine the future parking arrangement associated hence, preventing it to cause unnecessary headaches for the drivers. The main concern of planning parking activity will take note of the ways land and natural environments are conserved, valued, developed or organized using geographical understanding.
Data mining is the computational process of discovering patterns in large datasets, also known as “big data”. Whereas, for our project, the data collected are in time-series format. And time-series data is considered to be multidimensional data, as there is one observation per time unit and each time unit represents a dimension.
Parking utilization provides a time-series of typical parking demand for the development in that area that parking day. Thus, by comparing parking utilization comprehensively, the study will be able to clearly identify patterns and trends of those high and low usage car parks.
Hence, this paper seeks to explore using time-series data mining techniques to discover patterns and trends of similar car park sites within 29 shopping retail malls.
Project Background
Roads, today already take up 12% of Singapore’s total land area and with the limited land available, Singapore cannot afford to exhaust its land area by building more roads to accommodate vehicles and further expand the road network.
Moreover, Singapore’s population has been increasing over the years. With that, the scarcity must be allotted wisely. As Singapore continues to grow as a city, there is a need to increase the supply for housing, industrial and office estate. Therefore, it is not a realistic plan for every Singaporean household to own a car.
Having said that, car is not a basic necessity in Singapore since public transportation is well developed and easily accessible. However, Singaporeans seem to think otherwise as the number of households in Singapore that own a car increased to 45% in 2013 from 40% in 2008. In order to curb the amount of car ownership and to ensure the roads is smooth flowing and congestion-free, the authority affirmed that it would continue to emphasize the vehicle ownership and usage restraint measure.
Since 1990, the Certificate Of Entitlement (COE) system has enabled Singapore to exercise effective control of vehicle population growth. As Singapore becomes more urbanized, the social cost of car ownership will also increase. This is because land has to be set aside for parking spaces at not only where we reside, but also at the places where we work, study and play. Allocating more land for car parks means that there is less land for other developments, such as housing, schools or healthcare facilities. On top of that, illegal parking and congestion in local neighborhoods may also become more prevalent.
With these considerations in mind, Singapore Land Transport Authority (LTA) would like to understand the car park overspill situation in Singapore. Thus, LTA has requested Media Research Consultants Pte Ltd (MRC) to find out more through site survey and observation in theses car parks. The information collected is transformed into knowledge with MRC producing a detailed report and several info-graphics for each car park sites to summarize the findings. This information is crucial to LTA, as it will help it to better forward plan and handle the car park issues in Singapore.
