The Kochi Metropolitan Transport Authority (KMTA) has requested the National Transportation Planning and Research Centre (NATPAC) to coordinate with the agencies concerned to help ready a parking policy for Kochi in six months.
This follows a recent directive from Chief Secretary V.P. Joy to the KMTA to ready a parking policy and a digital Integrated Parking Management System (IPMS). The aim is to root out haphazard parking of vehicles and to ensure that rule violators are strictly dealt with.
Traffic planners have been citing the absence of standardised parking guidelines, slack enforcement by the police and the Motor Vehicles Department (MVD), and commercial and residential buildings not having the mandatory parking space as reasons for free-for-all vehicle parking in the city and suburban towns that come under the Greater Kochi area.
NATPAC director Samson Mathew said the agency intended to do, among other things, a study of the demand for parking in different areas of the city, which would help update the Comprehensive Mobility Plan (CMP) that had been readied in 2015 (in the run-up to the commissioning of the Kochi metro).
The CMP had referred to different aspects of streamlining parking, including by encouraging owners of vacant lands to convert them into pay-and-park facilities.
KMTA sources said a comprehensive parking policy would have to be readied, considering the needs of private and public transport vehicles (like buses, autorickshaws, and taxi cabs), goods carriers, and those like earth movers and cranes. “Else, they would continue to be parked on roads, stifling the movement of motorists and pedestrians. There would also have to be dormitory-type accommodation for drivers for taking rest,” they added.
Once readied, the parking policy will have to be notified with the help of urban transport planners. Digital IPMS will help streamline parking by informing motorists of the availability of parking space in their vicinity, as is being done in shopping malls. Multi-level parking options too must be tried out, provided the waiting time to retrieve vehicles is reduced. It would be great if fast recharging facility too was provided in parking lots, considering the rise in number of e-vehicles, said the sources.
The Greater Cochin Development Authority (GCDA), which runs pay-and-park lots at Marine Drive, International Stadium, and Manappattiparambu, is expected to chip in for streamlining parking.
