From now onwards, on-street parking outside one’s home would be a paid parking area in the City Beautiful.
A draft proposal will soon be made to decongest the city of rising parking woes due to increased vehicular density especially of cars and motorbikes.
UT Adviser Dharam Pal has ordered the Municipal Corporation of Chandigarh to begin with a pilot project of on-street paid parking in the city. To begin with, the pilot project will take off in the residential areas of Sector 35. As part of it, no one will be able to park vehicles on the V4, V5, and V6 roads. The V4 roads are the roads in front of the markets, V5 roads are the circular roads around the sectors, and V6 roads are the internal sector roads.
Very soon, the draft of the proposal will be out and the rates will be fixed. The rates will be fixed within the next fortnight. The project will take off in Sector 35, and soon the scope of this proposal will be extended in a phased manner across the city. The Chandigarh Administration had notified the policy in December 2020, however, it could not see the light of the day then.
Also as per the proposal, to ease the parking woes, the existing empty spaces in the sector near the shops, school boundaries, green belts, and other areas in Sector 35-A and 35-B would be made available for night parking which would be a paid facility.
Earlier, an inspection of various sites was carried out to ascertain the extent of the problem, and it was found out that particularly in front of marla houses there was a huge problem of parking with one family owning as many as two to three cars, and each marla house has two to three storeys thus making it virtually impossible for them to let the parking area be chaos free.
Residents welfare associations oppose paid parking
The eight nominated councilors of the Municipal Corporation have raise their opposition to increasing tax and parking .
Chandigarh Residents’ Associations Welfare Federation (CRAWFED) held an emergency emergent with the nominated Municipal Councillors of Chandigarh on the issue charges on parking private vehicles outside residential houses. They also raised their voice against the upcoming tax/extra-charges on depositing bills at e-Sampark Centre.
Dr Anish Garg, General Secy raised the demand of developing Community Parking in dense populated areas in place of fixing parking fees for the vehicles before the houses. Rajat Malhotra, Gen Secy suggested handover of the community parking slots to the residents so that they manage themselves.
All the eight nominated councillors, Dr R.S.Bedi, Umesh Ghai, Dharmendra Singh, Mahinder Kaur, Satinder Singh, Anil Masih, Naresh Panchal, Geeta Devi listened to the issues patiently and committed to put up the matter before the appropriate authority as well as in House too.
