More parking pains

Sunday, Sep 12, 2010



Forget the Commonwealth Games lane jams. What's going to get Delhi's goat is this: There's going to be a severe shortage of parking space during the Games. From the 200-odd legal parking lots that the MCD was running till the start of this year, the number has been cut down to just 111.

This spells trouble for the people as earlier the surface parking lots could accommodate 20,000 vehicles. Now they can hold only 11,100 vehicles.

Though the civic agency has identified 245 other surface parking lots, the Delhi traffic police have not yet approved these saying they will only add to the Games traffic jams. "We are running 111 parking lots. We had sent a list of new parking sites to the traffic police six months back for approval but they haven't approved them yet. The parking situation is already quite bad and with the traffic police refusing to approve these, it will create a huge problem," said a senior MCD official.

According to the civic agency, had the traffic police cleared 245 parking lots it would have created an additional parking space for 24,500 vehicles.

"We had carried out survey of all the parking lots before sending the list. Contrary to the traffic police's claims, these lots will not lead to any traffic jams. If these parking lots are not cleared soon the parking mafia will use this opportunity to run illegal parkings in the city," added the official.

Parking space in the city has been constantly shrinking over the past one year while the number of vehicles in the city has been rising. On an average, approximately 1,000 vehicles are added to Delhi 's roads daily.

The civic agency was also supposed to come up with 16 multi-level parking lots before the Game but they are yet to come up.

Original news source http://www.hindustantimes.com/More-parking-pains/Article1-599342.aspx