Parking on main roads poses security threat

LDA director admits flaws in enforcing rules and regulations on parking facilities

LAHORE: The dramatic increase in vehicular population, non-enforcement of rules and regulations and criminally silent attitude of city planners during the recent years have worsened the parking issues to the highest level in the provincial metropolis.

Almost every main road of the city is clogged with parked vehicles, which in the present situation can be a very high security threat as it is impossible for police and law enforcing agencies to check every vehicle in the city. Besides this, on road parked vehicles also slow down the traffic momentum and cause traffic jams, which daily results in serious inconvenience to the citizens.

During the last two decades, when the city was having a boom in commercialisation and urbanisation, our city planners completely ignored the basic parking principles and no strategies were evolved or adopted to solve future parking problems, which has now gripped the entire city.

Ironically, in the recent past, the Lahore Development Authority (LDA) and City government have completely failed to enforce building bylaws during the construction period of majority of multi-storey plazas, marriage halls, schools and commercial centres which either didn’t left parking places or changed its usage.

The silent negligence of LDA’s higher authorities in initiating any action against the officials of relative departments who let this happen have encouraged the new comers to continue ‘facilitating’ the business community in one way or the other. Even today a large number of buildings, including plazas, marriage halls and other commercial buildings, are under construction in violation of building bylaws but LDA director general and its chief town planner are ignoring, said a senior LDA official on anonymity. He said that strict vigilance and department action was a key to enforce building rules and regulations but who cares.

The most common question which citizens have in mind before leaving for destination is where they will park their car/bike. Though at the moment we need immediate and smart solutions to overcome this vital issue, the city also needs a long-term planning to deal with this problem for future as our population is increasing.

Urban planning experts believed that rapid increase in traffic demand, imbalance between parking lots and increasing number of vehicles are the main reason which aggravates this problem in the city. They said parking system played a key role in traffic management in the metropolitan and its absence resulted in traffic congestion, traffic accidents and environmental pollution.

Experts suggested the town planners to introduce Geographic Information System (GIS) for evaluating the existing parking problem in the city as this system was being used as a powerful technique for solutions of parking problems in many modern cities.

“The improvement of GIS technology opens a new way for urban parking planning and policy-making,” said Shahid Islam, a student of urban planning. He said the main reasons for parking problems in Lahore was the disparity between the supply of parking facilities and parking demand. “Our parking demand is very high due to unavailability of a mass transit project,” he said, adding the gap between demand and supply of parking spaces was widening year by year.

“Educate general publics about discouraging one car one person approach,” said Mudassar, a city resident. He said lately he was in Europe where he closely studied traffic and parking issues and found out that changing one car one person approach could result in a little relief to the Lahorities.

Lack of professional parking management is another issue, which aggravates the problem as irregular and illegal parking stands can be found on every main road of the city. This also showed the loose grip of civil administration and town planners on enforcement of rules and regulations.

Urban planning experts are of the view that the city government should communicate to the public through action that it is serious about enforcement of rules and regulations and no one is above the law. They said the government should work on devising a proper parking management policy.

Irshad Hussain, a senior citizen, said that free parking on the roads would only give rise to the overall congestion. “As a matter of fact there is a need to manage the demand and supply in a better fashion to pave way for modern parking solutions to come into the picture,” he said, adding citizens are ready to pay but for a standard service.

Dr Najam, a resident of Iqbal Town, said why don’t government make parking lots below roads. He said enforcement of law was very vital to clear the clogged roads, he said, adding one can witness wrong parking outside the LDA’s parking plaza in Moon Market, Iqbal Town.

Shazia Aziz, a student, said one way to handle the parking problem is to take away the subsidy provided for parking. “The charges for parking should be determined as per the land value of the particular area or the rent that is being charged for the same. It is also important that major sites of tourist interest, heritage zones and shopping areas are made strictly off limit for cars,” she suggested.

Recently multi-level parking lifts were introduced in Lahore by the government as well as some private companies. A rotator lift with 12 slots has been installed on Ferozpur Road near Ichhara while Lahore Mayor said that three more similar lifts would be erected at various other busy spots.

LDA’s Town Planning Director Khalid Mehmood said that strong political decisions were very important for implementation of rules and regulations. He admitted the fact that LDA had lacked in enforcing rules and regulations regarding parking facilities. The scribe also repeatedly tried to contact LDA’s Chief Town Planner Waseem Khan but he didn’t attend his cell phone neither replied to various SMS sent to him regarding the story.