CHENNAI: Aiming to streamline parking across the city, the Greater Chennai Corporation is planning to expand its on-street parking system to more areas. Under the system, one has to pay a fixed nominal charge for parking one’s car on the city streets. “If a resident is using the streets to park, it is only fair that they pay utility charges for it. We are looking to disincentivise haphazard parking and make sure a street has enough motorable space,” a senior Corporation official told Express.
At present, the city corporation has 5,000 Equivalent Car Spaces (parking spaces) in 23 roads, including Pondy Bazaar and streets in Purasawalkam, Anna Nagar and Besant Nagar, among others. The civic body is mulling to expand it to 12,000 ECS by the end of this month, and further take it up to 19,000 by September 15. The new areas that the corporation is looking to expand include streets in Mylapore such as RK Mutt Road, Evening Bazaar Road in Park Town, and a few streets in Doveton. The officials have identified around one lakh ECS across the city that could potentially be included into the parking system.
“For the last three weeks, we have been working to expand the system. We covered up to 5,000 ECS now, but could have covered more if not for Covid which took up a lot of our resources,” said an official. He added that they have had success with the system in T Nagar. “If you see, the congestion on the roads has reduced considerably and parking is more streamlined. We are looking to recreate the same in other streets, especially in commercial areas.” This is also a revenue stream for the corporation with users charged `5 per hour for two-wheelers and `20 per hour for four-wheelers.
Prior to the pandemic, the Institute of Transportation & Development Policy (ITDP), which supports the city corporation in this initiative, had undertaken a study on the availability of neighbourhood parking spaces in two wards and found that there was a larger scope for streamlined parking spaces. “Cities across the world have reduced traffic congestion through on-street parking management. Within a year (2011-12) of pricing on-street parking in a locality in Mexico City, time to search for a parking space was reduced from 13 minutes to 3 minutes. A study estimated an annual savings of about 7.5 million litres of fuel for the locality,” said Aswathy Dilip, Senior Programme Manager at the ITDP.