This cache highlights what is probably the dominant land use by floor space in the downtown area of Johor Bahru: off-street car parking.
Malaysian cities in general and Johor Bahru in particular has amongst the highest requirements in the world for minimum parking provision in new developments. An office building in the city centre, for example, is required to provide 2.2 car parking spaces for every 100 square metres of office floor space. This is more than ten times the requirement in Singapore (0.2 spaces per 100 sqm) and contrasts with the best practice in many cities worldwide which is to place a cap on off-street parking provision in new developments in dense downtown areas.
In central cities less parking is generally better, with cities worldwide reducing parking provision in order to encourage public transport and more active modes such as walking and cycling. This worldwide trend will likely catch on at some point in JB, but until then large multilevel podiums accounting for nearly a third of the total floor area of new developments are devoted to car parking. The architects often go to quite creative lengths to disguise the facade of the multilevel parking, as for example in the background of the cache area photo. Many of the older buildings, however, such as to the right of the cache area in the photo, put little or no design effort into the parking, which rather deadens the street. On the plus side, the lack of people should make it an easy place to search.