Many people still favour metered parking on roads

Many people still favour metered parking on roads

The Hindu

The Brigade Road Traders' Association introduced the facility two years ago

# The BMP scrapped paid parking in April last year
# Parking meters on Brigade Road have fetched Rs. 68 lakh in two years
# Businessmen in Commercial Street happy with metered parking

Bangalore: Some in the traffic police may welcome a total ban on parking on some arterial roads. Many people in the upwardly mobile section, just into their first big car, consider it almost an assault on their personal freedom.

Businessmen who have tried out metered parking on some streets believe metered parking might be the ideal solution; many of their customers agree. The police admit that metered parking with time limits might make their job a bit easier.

For a little more than two years, the Brigade Road Traders' Association has been providing parking space to an average of 1,200 cars through the working day with metered slots allotted for 85 cars at a time. Commercial Street, where metered parking is more severely limited by time slots, also has traders swearing by it. Both busy shopping districts have parking attendants, who make sure the vehicles are carefully parked and pulled away. The traders share the meter fees with the Bangalore Mahanagara Palike.

The Brigade Road association had to spend Rs 40 lakh for the imported meters and setting them up, but the shopkeepers are happy with the result. Only genuine shoppers use the parking slots and window shoppers would rather go for free parking somewhere else in the area. Can the experiment in these roads be replicated elsewhere? Both the traffic police and the BMP are cautious about that. "It can work best on relatively shorter stretches because of the investment and manpower involved. For longer roads, multi-level parking with strict time slots is the solution," they say.

Paid parking with BMP contracting out the roads, ended in April last year.

The opposition in the civic council came up with too many examples of malpractices, including multiple parking receipts with the same serial numbers, all pointing to the BMP being deprived of its revenue by parking contractors. But the police feel there is more indiscriminate parking now and they have to constantly deal with "double parking."