Nowadays by the increase of the population, most of the large cities suffer from the lack of public parking spaces. Public parking spaces as one of the important parts of a modern urban transportation system, plays an important role in decreasing the load of heavy traffic. Suitable site selection for public parking spaces not only increases the parking efficiency, but it also decreases marginal car parking and so results in increase of streets' width and traffic fluency. At the moment in most of the cities, public parking site selection is done by traditional methods or just visiting of the site. In this traditional method, considering all of the effective parameters in site selection is almost impossible and site selection is done by just considering some limited factors like land price. Therefore, in some cases this causes the selected site for parking to fall in area so far from tourist absorbing centres, or far from crowded streets, and finally the heavy traffic in city. Geographic Information System (GIS), as a science of analysis of spatial and attribute data, is an efficient tool to find optimum place for public parking. In this field of studies use of GIS results in decrease of field visit and increase of accuracy and reliability of results. In this paper, we introduce an optimum method for parking site selection by the use of GIS and considering almost all of the effective parameters simultaneously. In this article, effective factors are considered from two main points of view including parking efficiency and the problem of providing required land for parking especially in cities central regions. Then, conceptual model of parking site selection is presented. Suitable place for parking is also selected for one of the high traffic regions of Shiraz city in Iran. Different methods for information and layer integration are used and finally these methods are compared and the most suitable one is proposed.
