There's a lot to parking

There's a lot to parking
There are crores to be made in parking, so who would ever want to leave it alone?

The Hindu

THE MAYOR'S plan to do away with parking charges on city roads is welcome, but save your fireworks. The celebrations are likely to be as short-lived as the mayoral term. There is too much money in parking for it to be left alone. You cannot count me among the financial experts of this town, but some numbers I have worked out say something real about real estate.

Interesting arithmetic

Assuming generous figures, it could be said a single car occupies about 100 sq ft of space. Some buildings are charging Rs. 10 per hour of parking. Now, even if a single car occupies 10 hours of a slot in one of those buildings, it yields Rs. 100. We could assume the same realisation on the roads with a bigger turnover of parked vehicles. Of course, in reality, there could really be more cars and more money to be made, but even at the rate assumed, the real estate yield of parking space is one rupee per sq ft per day. That's smart rental value for some of the best office spaces in the city's business district.

There are close to three lakh cars in Bangalore. There isn't enough space for all of them and it is going to be a bigger squeeze all the time. The cars are paying for space in one-time investments in apartments and homes, in rentals and with parking fees. Even at Rs. 100 per car per day, we are talking of Rs. 3 crore per day. Two-wheelers occupy less space per vehicle and yield better value. If a million two-wheelers are spending a quarter of what a car must, we are talking of another Rs. 2.5 crore per day. The Mahanagara Palike's income from parking contracts is not likely to be even dimensionally close to those figures.

There will surely be better methodologies to work out these numbers, but you surely see the point here. Parking lots make better real estate. No building. Not much maintenance, overheads, capital investment on facilities. No fuss with water and electricity supplies. If there is five to six crore rupees to be made in a day, there will be operators in the city who will get to make it soon enough.

Owners of shops and restaurants have already figured this out. To accommodate custom and patronage with their own parking space is just too generous an idea. It is better to rent out space in buildings or on roads that have parking space and the customers will pay for it.

I went to lunch at a restaurant off M.G. Road and paid Rs. 40 for parking. Honestly. I don't know if you get intimidated by parking lot attendants, petrol bunk workers and security men. I do and pay up, even when I am convinced they are cheating.

There is really no need to get gloomy about all this. It is probably a good thing that there is a build up of natural disincentives to private transport. It is the way of the grown-up world, we are told, and aren't we a world city in the making? But the worry is that between now and the time the next city authority figures out why parking fees are necessary again, what is likely to happen at parking lots and roadsides? Does anybody believe that there won't be those types who won't pop at your window just as you are about to drive off, who just stick their hands into the window to ask: "Parking?" There will always be those, I am afraid, and they won't have tickets or any official sanction, but you have to reckon with them as long as they are there. Torn seats, dents, punctured tyres, perhaps. I am not suggesting pure malevolence here, just that there are "professional" parking entrepreneurs, they have so many employees to maintain and are entitled to some territorial behaviour.

To reiterate, briefly, the point about public spaces, private personal transport has radically transformed profiles of audiences at performances. The big halls in the city are increasingly pulling in only the loaded class not merely because they can afford the tickets, but surely because they have personal transport, mostly cars and many with drivers. "Suburban" spaces for performances — dance, music and theatre — were long held to be an ideal by many that believed that small and intimate art is what sustains experiment and innovation. But today such spaces are a practical necessity because the traffic is such a bitch, as they say.

Traffic schizophrenia

Big events can be held only at Palace Grounds, not because it is the ideal geographical location in the city in logistical terms, but mainly because there is parking space. If the event is even bigger, even Jakkur is not too far. Soon enough, we can all become nostalgic about political rallies at National College grounds in Basavanagudi. With the traffic schizophrenically divided, to use Elias Canetti's term, between crowds of vehicles on the move and crowds of vehicles parked, to bring in thousands to a rally will not be easy unless the netas get Rani Mukherjee to cheer the crowds. Not even then, perhaps. So let's park while we can. After that... there's always television.

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prakash@cfdbangalore.ac.in.