Thursday, August 30, 2012

So many cars? Where to go?

 It’s surprising to note that MCD’s low-cost parking service is often creating problems for scores of commuters on the busy Delhi roads. B&E analyses why it is time to announce a hike in parking rates. by Pawan Chabra
 24-year-old Sahil Arora was stunned when he was asked to pay `50 as charges for parking his car at a M-Block Market parking space in South Delhi. Sahil had moved to Delhi only a month back to join a private sector bank as a business development manager after completing his studies from Pune. While he was still struggling to adjust with the nerve-racking Delhi traffic, inflated parking charge was something that was certainly unacceptable to him.

“It was very shocking for me to pay `50 as I had left my car for just one hour in an ill-managed parking lot in South Delhi,” Sahil tells B&E. In fact, it’s not M-Block Market alone, the scenario is similar in almost all parking lots in and around delhi where customers are reportedly being charged a higher amount than the actual tariff fixed by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD). Further, with MCD arbitrarily increasing parking tariffs (much to the dismay of motorists in the Capital) in the recent past, top functionaries at the civic body seem to have failed in penalising these parking contractors perhaps indicating a nexus between the two. Ironically, MCD has also failed in checking illegal parking and providing more parking spaces to accommodate growing number of vehicles in the capital.

The story doesn’t end here. Even parking rates vary from region to region in Delhi. While a parking lot in Rajouri Garden charges close to `20 on the weekends on a single entry basis, the charges are high as `50 in areas like Greater Kailash, Janak Puri, et al. Interestingly, this is all on contractors’ will and well above `10, the actual charge fixed by MCD for a single entry in these parking lots. Considering that there are nearly 3.9 million vehicles running on the Delhi roads today (as per MCD website), one can surely imagine the amount of revenue slipping out of MCD’s hands. And if sources are to be believed, these contractors, at times, continue to run parking lots even after the expiry of the contract without paying an additional fee. So, does that mean that there is nothing that can stop this illegal activity alongwith solving the traffic woes of the city?

According to the recent Colliers International’s global parking rate survey, India turns out having the cheapest parking rates in the world. Parking rates in central business districts in Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi are still less than $2 a day in when compared with parking charges in cities like Johannesburg ($40), Bangkok ($12.32), Shanghai ($12.91) and Moscow ($24.62). In fact, cities like Abu Dhabi ($55), Oslo ($54.52), Tokyo ($54.5), London ($52.24) and Sydney ($51.18) reign the charts when it comes to daily parking charges. The data certainly shows a way towards solving Delhi’s problems, at least to a certain extent.


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