Are Malaysian Street Parking Space Sizes Regulated?

Street parking bays in city centres and dense suburban areas are an absolute luxury, especially during peak periods such as lunch and dinner. Apart from businesses illegally cordoning-off public parking lots for their personal use, there seems to be another issue at hand: the size of these lots.

If you glance at the image below, it would seem that the owner of the white BMW was being inconsiderate with his parking ethics by taking up extra space on the left. However, a closer look at both sides shows us that said BMW’s parking was perfect on the drivers side, yet he couldn't make it fit into the space provided.

How can this happen? Is the BMW, which happens to be a flagship  7-series model, simply too big for our Malaysian parking lot sizes? Not quite… By no means is this the fault of the car or its owner. Instead, either the municipal council, which in this case is Majlis Bandaraya Petaling Jaya (MBPJ), or their appointed contractors, or the developer, are perhaps to blame here.

By manufacturer's specification, the BMW pictured has a width of 1,902 MM, and that is with the side mirrors in open position. A parking lot size, in accordance with PLANMalaysia specification, should be 2,500 MM wide. Based on these figures, clearly the BMW should have nearly 600 MM of extra space to park properly. However, it is obvious that the parking spaces in Sunway Damansara pictured are much narrower than 1,902 MM.

One reason we reckon caused this is developers deliberately reducing the size of parking lots in dense locations as pictured. Based on PLANMalaysia’s requirement, there has to be a certain number of parking bays allocated by every developer for each area, be it housing or commercial types, based on the number of buildings and business lots present. Reducing the parking lot size is an easy workaround to meet this requirement, and we highly doubt anyone has actually gone to physically measure each parking lot to verify their sizes.

So, who should actually be blamed for this then? CariCarz.com managed to get in touch with PLANMalaysia officers about this. Based on their explanation via their guideline, the entire implementation and management of parking spaces is the responsibility of the local municipal council.

If so, why are the size guidelines not followed? Who is turning a blind eye on this? The officers are surely on ground daily issuing summons, hence it's highly unlikely they would have missed it. If the parking lines were drawn by a third party contractor, who signed-off on this considering how long these parking lots have existed for?