BENGALURU: Five years on, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) is yet to implement the automated pay-and-park system in the city. Reason: Officials have failed to find a ‘qualified’ bidder.
Parking is one of the biggest problems haunting the city with over 63 lakh vehicles. At commercial places, parking gets worse during peak hours. To reduce parking woes of motorists, BBMP approved to introduce on-street pay and parking in 2012.
In 2013, the state government too gave its nod. In December 2014, BBMP had called for tenders for on-street automated parking on 56 roads. By April 2015-end, BBMP was supposed to finalise the bidder, but did not get a qualified one.
In September 2015 they called for tenders again and received three applications. All were rejected as they were either technically or financial not qualified. In May 2017, BBMP in its tender proposed for design, development, implementation, operation and maintenance of ‘Smart Parking Solution’ for on-street, off-street and indoor parking spaces on Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) model. This time they identified 85 roads.
“Two agencies have shown interest. We have asked them to display their system on July 15. We need to check the technical bid followed by financial bid. If we do not get qualified bidder, we might have to go for re-tender again,’’ Prabhakar, Chief Engineer (Road Infrastructure- Traffic Engineering) BBMP said.
BBMP sources said there is a strong lobby of officials who are hand-in-glove with private operators, who are part of illegal pay parking services. “Every time they say they did not get a qualified bidder. They take more than a year to call for a re-tender, this shows they are purposefully delaying it,” sources in BBMP said.
In Bengaluru there are at least 300 illegal parking spaces. “Some people are managing five to six such locations. Tenders are being floated for some of these roads,” said a bidder. Sources from city Traffic Police said, BBMP has identified these roads without consulting them. “We are the one who maintain traffic and parking violations. Already we are staff crunched. More number of on-street parking means, more burden on us. BBMP should have consulted us,’’ sources said.
Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic) R Hithendra said he cannot comment on this issue as both BBMP and police are government agencies. “We cannot reveal what observation we made, it is been communicated to BBMP authorities,’’ he added.
