Multi-storey car park

A multi-storey car-park (also called a parking garage, parking structure, parking ramp, parkade or parking deck) is a building designed specifically to be for automobile parking and where there are a number of floors or levels on which parking takes place. It is essentially a stacked car park.

Nomenclature

The term multi-storey car park is used in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and many Commonwealth of Nations countries. In the western United States, the term parking structure is used, especially when it is necessary to distinguish such a structure from the "garage" in a house or an automobile petrol station. In some places in North America, "parking garage" refers only to an indoor, often underground structure – outdoor multi-level parking facilities are referred to by a number of regional terms:

• Parking garage is used in the Western United States, English-speaking Canada and by civil engineers;
• Parking deck is used in the Southeast;
• Parking ramp is used in the upper Midwest, especially Minnesota and Wisconsin, and has been observed as far east as Buffalo, New York.
• Parkade is used in South Africa.

Architects and civil engineers in the USA are likely to call it a parking structure instead, since their work is all about various structures, and that term is the vernacular in some of the western United States. When attached to a high-rise of another use, it is sometimes called a parking podium. In the United States building codes use...
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