If all the 5.75 lakh cars registered in the city were to be parked on-street parallel to one another, the area that the vehicles occupy would be as much as seven per cent of Chennai. As existing regulations on parking are inadequate and the enforcement is lax, most of the vehicles in the city eat into precious space on the road.
Questioning a system that surrenders such a large area of urban land to idle vehicles, a comprehensive study on ‘Parking management in Chennai' recommends a slew of corrective measures. The report is likely to be submitted to the CMDA and the Chennai Corporation shortly.
The primary recommendation of the study is to introduce well-defined parking zones that are fairly priced as “the city cannot afford to keep on supplying free parking.” The city-wide surveys found that clearly demarcated parking areas are by and large absent.
Raj Cherubal of Chennai City Connect, an NGO working on transportation issues which commissioned the study, says that present regulation has had no influence on demand.
“Our focus is to find out what will happen if everybody wants to park on the road. We now have numbers to show that such an arrangement is clearly unsustainable.”
Besides, the problem is only going to get worse as the rate of vehicular growth in the city is about 10 per cent per annum. Each month, nearly 4,000 new cars and over six times that number of two-wheelers hit the road.
“Marking permissible on-street parking zones in yellow and towing vehicles that violate must intensify,” said Mr. Cherubal.
A case study of four areas – Purasawalkam, T.Nagar, R.K. Salai and Mylapore – also threw up some interesting revelations. It shows that motorists prefer paying a fee for parking, especially in commercial areas. They find the parking meter system “transparent” since it increases their chances of finding an empty slot.
Another recommendation is providing limited enforcement powers to parking attendants, many of whom are members of the Tamil Nadu Ex-Servicemen's Corporation (TEXCO).
Some of the suggestions are likely to be tried out soon since the Chennai City Traffic Police are in the middle of observing a month-long community outreach programme to raise awareness of parking issues.
