Adding Parking Stalls: Tricks and Tips for Efficient Placement

Now that we have a couple tricks up our sleeve for how to add the parking, we can use our judgment for which one we want to use for each situation. And so when you start looking at this and asking yourself, "Well, how should I apply the stalls to, say, this area, or this area, or this one?"—it doesn't really matter which area—you can use your judgment and decide, "All right, I want to use the array tool here, " or, "I'm just better at copying it anyway, so I'm just going to go with that process and stick with it." Either way it works; there's certainly not an advantage one way or the other. The bottom line here is that you just get the stalls located in the spaces that need them.

Learn Revit

• Nationally accredited
• Create your own portfolio
• Free student software
• Learn at your convenience
• Authorized Autodesk training center

Learn More

We'll just continue on with the same process here, and I'm going to go ahead—and I always like to just double-check and see what it is before I start placing it—and so I can see it's a nine-footer. You definitely don't have to go through the same process like this, just checking one and then placing it. There are multiple ways to do it, and certainly some are better than others, but definitely, whatever you feel more comfortable using, go right ahead and do that method. So I'm going to use the array method because I can kind of see I'll just get a good loop here, and if I start with this one, I'll end with a stripe here and not there. So I just see those things, and it seems like it'll work well. So this is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine spaces that we're going to array. So use the Array tool, set the number to nine, making sure it's still on that second option, and then array it across. And there we go. And so if I had just gone through and copied it instead of counting and making sure I had it all set up, you know, I probably could have done it just as fast. In this case, I can see I've got—that was nine—looks like it was either 10 or 11 spaces, and it's about the same here. So I could take the whole thing like this, and I can also copy it over, and that works incredibly well, as you just witnessed there. And I could do the same thing, even though it's on a different angle; I can do the same thing here. I can copy this one across to here. And notice it's still all selected; well, then I can use my Rotate tool, I could place the dot at the endpoint here, and then I can rotate it down to align with the stalls, and everything else seems to kind of just fall into place there. So it's a lot of the same types of modify tools that we've used in other applications. We're just applying it to this one here. And so you don't want to discount yourself and say, "OK, well we're copying parking spaces; I have to do it a certain way, " because that's certainly not the case. And so when you get to something like this, where it looks like it might be a different type, the first thing I do is I always dimension it. So it's 15; I think these were 16—these were—and it's got another overhang. So I'll just do a Create Similar here, and then I can place the one at this point. And so instead of the 16, I'll do an Edit Type, Duplicate, and make another type for the 15-foot-deep space, and then I'll change the parameters in my Type Properties here. The name matches the space size, so I'll hit OK, and then I could either array or copy it across. So I'll array this time. So this is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen—so we'll just do Array using that second option as well, fourteen. And this could go bad if there's not good division between those spaces. That's really the big downside there is if this doesn't all add up, then you can have an issue there. So here's one of those cases where the spot didn't give us the right striping—but no big deal because I'll just delete it and then mirror this one. All right, so we're done with the first half here, and now we just have to do the rest. And this will be pretty easy because again, it's just the same stuff over and over again. If I were to dimension this to make sure that's a nine-footer—these are nine-foot—so we can copy essentially this whole row right here across, and then I can delete the ones we don't need at the end there, and that one's done. And then these look very similar for those two there, so I'll check and see—those are 15s. This end one looks a little wide, same with that one, but that's OK. So I'll grab a few of these ones—the 15s—and I could copy it, so I'll just grab it from that endpoint. And I can start with one of these ones that I know is going to be a little bit better dimension-wise, and then we'll mirror it—or rotate it, rather—into place. And you can see this is where we start ending up with some weird things if we don't have the right width defined. So see how it gets further and further away? And so these were 15 by nine. And so I'll delete all of them except for one, and then I can adjust this one to the nine-foot width. We'll do a Duplicate—anytime we're making a change in the parking stall type, we always want to be duplicating because we're clearly using these in a lot of other locations. So adjusting the parameter now after giving it the name, and then I'll realign it. And then at this point, I can just go through and do a lot of copying. And so you can always—like I just did here—copy a couple at a time, or say, "Let's copy all of these." There's certainly nothing wrong with any of those methods that you choose to go with. You just want to make sure you get everything kind of accurately placed. And so I'll check this last set here: nine feet by fifteen feet—that's this exact type. So I'm really just going to grab all of these spaces, copy them to this point, and then—clearly not the right rotation—but that's OK because we can rotate them. Instead of using this place option, you can always grab this dot here, drag it, and then hit it over to the point where you want it, and then I can rotate again to put it into place. Ended up with one extra—no big deal, though, because we can just delete it. And now we've got one more row to do before we have to do the new parking lot. And this one is going to be nine-foot by eighteen-foot stalls. So back to our standard one, which was this guy back here, and then I'll kind of set it up. And then, using the mirror tool, set it into place. And again, if you wanted to use the array, you definitely could. I'm going to go with the copy option because it goes pretty quickly. And that time I actually had the base file selected, so I had to reset that because I definitely don't want to copy that thing around. And then I'll grab all of those. And when you're doing this process here, you want to keep an eye on where you need to copy to so you're not doubling up. And so I can see this is the last one in my selection, and so I'll go from endpoint to endpoint, and just one more set there should do it. And there we go. So that's all the stalls that we have on our existing side. You can see if I do a big selection, I've got all those parking stalls selected now. And then we can do the rest of the parking on the new portion of the building, and the accessible stalls are what we have left. And so what I'd like you to do is—and this doesn't necessarily need to be captured on the video here—as we go through and add the stalls onto this side, because what we're going to do in the next video is we're going to look at how we add the accessible parking in. And so I'd like you on your own to go in and add the rest of these parking stalls using the tips and tricks that we've shown in the last few videos.