I came across this video that Aaron Maller posted a few days ago and I thought it was worth sharing. In it, Aaron is simply laying out some Parking families in Revit, but it is interesting to see the various ways in which people build and use their own content. There are almost always things that you can learn from other people to improve your own methods and content.

Here are a few things that I found noteworthy…

First, there are some commonalities between all of the families:

• The thickness of the stripe is shown in plan. This is not the standard when creating site plans, usually parking stripes are only shown as a line, but I think this must be a result of our old AutoCAD workflows. However, using lines (at least in plan) is still cleaner (and is still the standard).
• The parking bumper (or wheel stop) is included. This might be a bit of a no-brainer, but if you don’t frequently use bumpers you can set them to not visible by default.

And a few notes about individual families:

• ADA Parking family has a flip control. This is interesting, though it is something I have not done before because of the effect on the ADA symbol. Aaron solves this by having two symbols and controlling their visibility with an instance parameter.
• Parking bay family is line-based. This makes a lot of sense and makes for a very intuitive user experience when laying out the bay.
• Individual stripe family (also line-based) is used to do custom striping. This is a useful concept and since the parking family is created from these, they seem to trim together fairly well, though it seems like the result may not always be perfect.

Also, I was intrigued that the standard bay and parallel bay were in the same family (though different types).

And if anyone is interested, Aaron posted another video showing a bit more behind the scenes of the parameters in these parking families.

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For anyone who has never created a Parking family, specifically a parking bay, there are a few key concepts:

First, create a single parking family and then nest it into another parking (or line-based) family. This nested family should be shared and also contain a specific parameter that can be filtered in the schedule. Also, if you want to be able to change the angle of the space, it will probably take a bit of time and effort to get the right constraints in place.

Once you have the nested parking space in the bay family, array the single space to create the bay. The array can then be constrained and, if you are using a line-based family, you can associate the length of the array to the length of the line.