Visitor on Top

I visited the Menara Sunway, the corporate headoffice of Sunway Group http://www.sunway.com.my/ for a meeting, and was pleasantly surprised as I drove into their visitor carpark. Most office buildings in Kuala Lumpur would make all their visitors drive down to the basement carpark, usually in B2, B3 or worse (as in the VisionCity building) B4. In Menara Sunway, visitors gets to park in their B1 lots, sparing me the head spinning effort of spiraling down 3 or 4 down ramps. Instead, the folks at Sunway have made their employees and staff park on the lower floors and in the outdoor parking lot. This is indeed a refreshing change.

Actually, it really does make any sense to put visitors on top. After all, most visitors would be spending 1 - 2 hours in the building, why make them spiral down 3 or 4 floors of parking. Until today, I still do not see the logic of building managers making their visitors do that.

Visitors on Top makes economic and common sense :

1. As tenants of buildings will know their way around the lower basement parking floors as they are there each day, rather than visitors getting lost trying to find empty slots. Their constant driving around generates heat in the basement car parks.
2. Tenants driving into the building in the morning will park their cars and by 10am or so, their car engines will probably have cooled therefore causing less strain on the carpark ventilation system for the rest of the day
3. When visitors are forced to park at the lower basement floors, they are actually causing more wear and tear on the up/down ramps and as heat rises, their warm engines will cause more strain on the ventilation system throughout the day. The heat generated makes most basement car parks unbearably hot in KL, especially in integrated office cum shopping malls.
4. It can easily be proven that the ventilation fans in the basement care parks can account for more than 10% - 20% to the total cost of running a typical office building.
5. A B1 or B4 has no relevance to tenants who usually drive in & out once each work day, and besides the different floors is just a push of a button on the lift panel.
6. Even worse is the bosses, senior managers or main tenants of buildings have their parking lots right on the upper floors, when they are usually the ones that needs it the least, as they usually have their personal drivers in tow.
7. Besides, VIP or anchor tenants are usually the ones paying the least on a per square foot for their office space (due to the space they occupy) so why give them convenient B1 parking.

Unless someone has a good argument for NOT putting visitors on B1, I think there should be a law that building owners have to allocate the top basement floors to visitor parking.

Building with the worst visitor carparks in Kuala Lumpur are Phileo Damansara, Phileo Avenue, Central Plaza (its reverse - you have to spiral at least 7 floors up, before you can find visitor parking!), Vision City towers... anyone has more to add ?

So, if you have the power to change, please make visitors park on top!!