JEDDAH, 26 August 2004 — A rash of non-legal “no parking” signs is appearing in the residential areas of north Jeddah. With the building boom accommodating people vertically in multi-floor apartment blocks, the roads are becoming overcrowded with vehicles belonging to the residents. The problem is compounded with many available spaces filled with sprawling piles of building rubbish and poorly positioned garbage skips.

Crude handwritten signs, made to look as official as possible, are nailed to trees or hung on walls. At the other extreme, crudely painted notices are hung from sharp pieces of angle iron buried in sand-filled buckets that stand in public roads outside apartment buildings. Often they and the spaces they delineate are jealously guarded by the “haris” (janitor) attached to the building.

Both seek to deceive by blurring the distinction between what is private property and public highway. Neither addresses the underlying causes of the problem — too many cars and not enough parking space made available when residential and commercial premises are planned or built.

These extra and illegal road hazards combine with the large orange rubbish skips that often protrude into the narrow roads of residential areas and the detritus from building sites by the roadside. The whole combination creates hazardous driving conditions, especially at night.

The problem of parking space is not restricted to residential areas. Many smaller commercial premises have taken on the practice of placing what are effectively road-hazards outside their shops and offices.

Hatem, a marketing manager for a publishing company, was both blocked in by vehicles and physically attacked by one shopkeeper on Prince Majed (Sabaeen) Street when he parked to make a purchase from another shop.

“He had written a sign saying the area was for private parking on a piece of card and put it outside his shop,” said Hatem. “I told him that the street was public property and challenged him to produce documents saying it was his. This appeared to upset him so much he attacked me.”

The appearance of these “ad hoc” parking defense measures is a symptom of the rising pressure on space in Jeddah driven by the four percent national birth rate and seven percent total growth of the population of Jeddah each year — boosted by immigration from the country areas. Easy finance and the highly competitive nature of the car sales business also add to the demand for road-space.

Abu Salem, a translator and an angry resident of the Al-Rawdah district, has encountered constant problems from neighbors and local residents. “I know that legally the street outside a house of apartment block is public property. Because people need to park their cars, they park without consideration to others by leaving them across garage entrances or doorways. That is just bad manners.”

He has seen fights break out over parking spaces. A visitor, with no options open but to park outside a building nearby, was threatened and abused by a resident of the building who regarded the space as his private domain and had scrawled a notice on cardboard to say so. He recounted incidents of neighbors working in concert to block visiting cars into spaces by moving their own vehicles to within a couple of centimeters of them or even in one case, puncturing the tires or scratching the paintwork.

The problem, Abu Salem thought is a combination of bad planning and the greed of landowners to subdivide plots of land in expensive neighborhoods to make a quick profit. “It is the old problems,” he said. “Lack of regulation and a total lack of planning. It is obvious to anyone but the municipality that parking spaces are needed for new apartments. They should learn a lesson from Europe where new apartments or offices cannot be built in cities without sufficient underground parking.”