Guest column: Convert basements into parking facilities'

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” is a well known management principle and it applies to parking in Bengaluru too. Until and unless the parking situation is assessed on the ground, we will forever be talking in abstract terms. Parking is a huge problem, but it is not the same problem everywhere.  We need to use the  ward committees effectively to better understand local issues and work out solutions.

Walk around  Puttenahalli in JP Nagar any evening and you will find a sea of cars and two- wheelers taking up every inch of space, not just on the main road but in all side streets, making life difficult for residents. Walk back onto the main street, lined with commercial buildings, and you find that every basement has a shop of some kind. This phenomenon repeats itself in every ward. So we need to let the ward committees identify violators and follow this up with swift action by the BBMP to levy penalties and convert the basements back into parking facilities.
It is unfair that public space is taken up by car owners. Going by  a study, 40 per cent of internal roads is occupied by parked vehicles.  The BBMP Council must evolve bylaws for parking to allow each ward to decide which areas can have paid parking and what fee should be charged.

We need to leverage the fact that highly commercial areas like the Central Business District, Indiranagar, Malleswaram and Jayanagar, are now all connected by Namma Metro and impose high parking fee around them on the lines of Rs 100 per hour on weekdays and Rs 200 per hour on weekends to persuade people to leave their vehicles at home and opt for the Metro instead to get to them.  Needless to say, there must be excellent last mile connectivity in terms of good footpaths, autos and buses to make a success of this.

— Srinivas Alavilli, Co-founder, Citizens for Bengaluru