To decongest Delhi, say no to roadside parking
It is only recently that parking charges were hiked from a flat R 10 in most places to an hourly R 20. But unauthorised slots still comes free and are claimed as a matter of right if they happen to be outside one’s shop, workplace or home. Little wonder that authorised parking, especially multi-level parking units, lie unused because those spots come for a fee.
It is only fair that we pay for the public space our cars occupy. Early this year, the draft parking policy — a first for Delhi — recommended a differential fee on only notified roads, even in residential neighbourhoods. The world’s car capital, United States, had priced the kerbsides as early as the 1930s after the downtown shop owners complained about the parked cars left by workers during the day, reported the Citylab in an article tracking the history of parking meters.
The clutter of cars left no space for shoppers and business was suffering. So newspaperman Carl Magee from Oklahoma City created the parking meter. Placed along the kerb in July 1935, the meters charged a car a nickel an hour. Car owners were outraged at what they called a tax on “their right to own vehicles”, the article reported. But by the early 1940s, there were more than 140,000 parking meters in operation in the US and generating some $10 million annually.
In a clever bit of legal manoeuvring, the Citylab stated, cities overcame the argument that they could not charge for the use of public spaces by claiming that drivers were paying for the enforcement of parking and not the space itself. That might have taken care of the problem of illegal parking. But reducing the use of car requires still harsher measures. Delhi, in particular, needs to reduce parking space to make its streets navigable.
Brazil’s São Paulo, for instance, has got rid of as much as 10% — 4,000 slots — of its total parking space. Switzerland’s Zurich implemented a kind of “cap and trade” of parking spots, where for every offstreet spot built, an on-street parking spot was converted into a park or a community space, reported the Scientific American.
But to see through such reforms, a city needs effective enforcement. Delhi, for one, is chaotic because even the existing parking rules are seldom enforced. The draft parking policy does propose to delegate some of the enforcement and punitive powers under the Motor Vehicles Act, which the traffic police have, to municipal officers.
While the move will help align responsibility with accountability, Delhi needs to show more urgency in implementing the new parking policy. Beyond reclaiming mobility, it is also about breathing easy in a city rated among the most polluted in the world.