Bengaluru Citizens Can Be Banned From Buying New Car/Bike If They Don’t Have Parking: Will This Work?

Bangalore is mostly known as Silicon Valley of India due to the sof its role as the nation’s leading information technology (IT) exporter. Indian technological organisations are headquartered in the city.

But as much as it known for its technology and start up ecosystem, there is one more thing it is particularly known for, which is not something to be proud of, it’s chronic traffic. Bengaluru has time and again sought solutions to tackle its traffic woes.

“Desperate times call for desperate measures”:-

CM B S Yediyurappa on Tuesday chaired a high-level meeting chaired to explore the possibility of denying permission for consumers to buy a new vehicle if they fail to furnish proof of parking space in their residence.

In this meeting, CM reviewed the proposed Parking Policy 2.0 for Bengaluru, drafted by the Directorate of Urban Land Transport (DULT).

Uncontrolled parking in public spaces, according to officials, is contributing majorly to the traffic congestion and a new parking policy must be devised as the city has recently seen a proliferation in new vehicles.

Some focus areas amongst 10 focus areas are:-

·      paid parking

·      private parking management

·      organised parking systems

According to BDA chairperson S R Viswanath “People park on both sides of the road. Some vehicles are not taken out for days together and pourakarmikas find it difficult to sweep streets because of that. We have to take a tough stance on the parking problem in the city”. Further he advocates that

substantial evidence must be provided by citizens who intend to buy a new vehicle.

Since this move seems to solve the problem but many officials have raised their concerns about making such a rule mandatory.

Recommendations to tackle the parking woe:-

Earlier this year, the DULT(Directorate of Urban Land Transport had invited objections from the public to the draft policy.

Chief Secretary T M Vijay Bhaskar has been asked by the CM to discuss the recommendations with senior officials, while reviewing and revising the Parking Policy 2.0 draft before bringing it to the Cabinet.

The policy talks about a city-wide parking inventory with unique IDs assigned to each parking space will be prepared and proof of parking will be made mandatory to purchase a vehicle or while registering new vehicles or transferring ownership of registered vehicles.

Other recommendations from the meeting are:-

·      Utilising neighbourhood vacant sites as parking spaces, which the site owners can monetise.

·      Using vacant government land

·      Ban on parking within a one-km radius of a multi-level parking facility

·      Extending smart parking facility across the city roads

While the plan seems ambitious and audacious, I guess we will have to wait and watch how the plan is rolled out. Also what the vehicle manufacturers have to say about these developments would be interesting to know.