Pay-and-park back from Nov.

Pay-and-park back from Nov.
The Times of India

Bangalore: Pay-and-park will be back from November. Cocking a snook at the Congress-run Bangalore Mahanagara Palike, the JD(S)- BJP coalition government has struck down its resolution demanding scrapping of the muchmaligned pay-and-park scheme. Simply put, it means the scheme is returning in a bigger and a modified avatar.

Officials say 180 roads will come under the pay-and-park purview. Of these, 35-40 roads will be slotted for metered parking, a la Brigade Road and Commercial Street.

The metered parking has been acknowledged as an expensive option, so this might just be the preserve of roads in the Central Business District while the remaining roads will continue with the previous system of manual collection.

If there is a directive from the government to reintroduce it, why dither till November? “We need at least two months for the bidding process,’’ say officials. Incidentally, it might just work to the advantage of the corporators whose tenure ends in November and the municipal body goes to polls.

Just after the scheme was scrapped, a slew of measures were bandied about to regulate the “chaos’’ that commuters and the traffic police complained about. One of them was to get in telecom majors to look after parking lots for an incentive of advertising. The proposal did not take off.

PARKING LOT
In April 2005, the BMP Council passes a resolution, scrapping the pay-and-park scheme In Sept., the then police chief writes to BMP citing rising instances of vehicle thefts and asks that the scheme be reintroduced Early 2006, JS(S)-BJP government strikes down BMP’s decision and asks it to introduce the scheme with modifications April 2006, BMP requests government to reconsider and maintain ban on pay-and-park Government rejects BMP’s plea; pay-and-park to return in Nov.