HYDERABAD: There is a shortage of parking spaces in the city, making the Hyderabad traffic police happier, as it has helped them collect over `7 crore in fines, so far, in the current financial year itself.
There are a total of 26.62 lakh vehicles in Hyderabad city with over 1.6 lakh new vehicles having hit the road so far this year.
Even though the number of vehicles on the roads increases on a yearly basis, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) authorities are unable to provide adequate parking space for all new vehicles, whose numbers are growing with each passing day.
This allows the city traffic police to generate more income by imposing fines on those who violate traffic rules with regard to parking. Proving this, there has been an increase in the number of cases booked under parking violations in the city, with 2015 seeing the highest number of cases registered in a decade. The increasing trend has continued this year too.
GHMC hopes to bank on the increased number of parking fine cases as a deterrent to push the public into adopting parking at the proposed multi-level parking facilities.
“The most important factor is that people don’t have parking discipline,” said LS Chauhan deputy commissioner of police traffic. It is the responsibility of commercial establishments to create exclusive parking spaces for their customers, most of the parking violators are those who use commercial areas, he added.
The GHMC is now trying to find a solution to the growing parking problems in the city by building multi-level car parking facilities.
“We have to go for a mechanised multi-level parking as a solution,” said GHMC commissioner B Janardhan Reddy.
In 2015, the GHMC had announced it would build four multi-level car parking facilities that could accommodate over 400 cars each at key areas in the city. But, this has not materialised so far.
The GHMC and the city traffic police joined hands in recent months to come up with, “a new parking system that is foolproof”. “In a couple of weeks we will publish a world class Request For Proposal (RFP) inviting proposals from private parties,” said Janardhan Reddy.
“Depending on the number of hours the citizens will be charged. The parking costs will be within a range and will be competitive as for a mechanised multi-level car parking, private parties have to invest,” he added.
According to him, the new multi-level car parking will have a GPS based slot booking facility. The GHMC will integrate the best possible features and technology in the proposed system. If people are going somewhere, they can find out where the nearest parking spaces and book slots are.
In fact, the GHMC had allotted parking contacts to 15 circles on annual contacts, which are now expired. These contracts have not been renewed following complaints from the traffic police that these contractors were over charging the public.
“The traffic police contention is that wherever we have given parking contracts they were collecting huge amounts, so they requested till we evolve a good parking system to give the public, free parking,” said Janardhan Reddy.
GHMC officials are now planning to come with “a new parking system that is foolproof,” which will be operated through Public Private Partnership (PPP) model, he added.