“More often than not, I find it very difficult to get my car in and out of my house these days. Invariably, one or more vehicles are parked in front of my gate. I have grown tired of asking the motorists to make way for me to enter or exit my house,” says an exasperated resident on Shastri Road.
Known to be a posh and serene locality all these years, Shastri Road has now become a favoured destination for commercial establishments, hotels and retail outlets, even as other commercial areas of the city have reached a saturation point. But this has brought along attendant traffic problems to the area.
The recent Deepavali festival saw the problem at its worse as the road was bursting at its seams owing to the indiscriminate parking of vehicles, especially cars, in front of the hotels, hospitals, banks and textile shops along the road.
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The road was so constricted that traffic snarls became frequent, complain residents. Though the city police had earmarked temporary parking areas in view of the festival in the city’s main commercial area around the NSB Road, no regulation was enforced in Thillai Nagar.
Most of these commercial establishments that have come up along the road do not have any parking space for visitors. The parking areas in some of these commercial buildings could hardly accommodate a few vehicles, leaving most visitors to park their vehicles on the roadsides.
The problem of unregulated parking has already created much resentment among Thillai Nagar residents. People visiting shops and commercial establishments along the Thillai Nagar Main Road park their vehicles on the cross roads, shrinking road space and causing frequent accidents. Residents suggest that parking should be banned for at least 100 metres on the cross roads and also on the Thillai Nagar Main Road and Shastri Road. No multi-storeyed building should be allowed without their designated parking space, they say.
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The Mahatma Gandhi School junction on the road too has turned a bottleneck as scores of two wheelers and cars could be seen parked in front of a commercial complex right through the day.