No place in the city to park your worries

No place in the city to park your worries

Deepika Arwind

Organised parking space is mostly a luxury and paid parking is still restricted to a few areas

Bangalore: There is no good reason why parking spaces should be easily available in the city. The volume of traffic is more than the roads can handle, building bylaws are often violated, transferring parking on to the roads, organised parking space is mostly a luxury only big malls offer and paid parking is still restricted to a few commercial areas.

On any given day of the week, there are some roads that are full beyond their capacity when it comes to parking. Take Commercial Street for instance. While metered parking aims to keep parking in rotation on this street, there is always a crunch of space. A trail of parked four-wheelers and two-wheelers is found in the bylanes, which are not meant for parking in any case.

Imtiaz, who owns a furniture shop on Commercial Street, says that he parks his car in the basement and even at 8 p.m., when he is shutting down the store, there are always cars blocking the way.

Mahatma Gandhi Road is still a saga of parking woes. Right from Kids Kemp onwards, where the Metro Rail construction has begun, the space crunch is so severe that people park their vehicles on the road itself.

K. Bhushan, who works in a building at Trinity Circle, is one of them. He defends his action saying there is no other option for vehicle owners. “I don’t think we are doing anything wrong. Where we park is a wasted space before the construction, which cannot be used by anyone anyway. In fact we suffer because our cars are coated in dust at the end of the day.”

On Church Street, things are no different. Its one-way status and the fact that there are over 35 restaurants on this road have people inching along looking for a parking spot. Just to cope with the situation, parking attendants now allow three rows of parked cars even as pedestrians are increasingly squeezed further to the edge of the road.

A separate area allotted just for two-wheelers is beneficial till 10 a.m. when the last of the parking spots are taken till the evening. After that chaos is the order of the day. “I have to race here in the morning to get my spot,” says Amit Shah, a front office person in a hotel here who rides to work and back.

Perpendicular to this street, St. Marks road tells a similar story. Shop owners say the situation is worse on weekends. The nearby Lavelle Road can be described as a row of parked cars on all weekdays. “After the number of boutiques, coffee shops, and restaurants has seen a rise here, we have fought to keep one side of the road free of cars,” says Anirudha. S.T., a resident.