Solutions to the parking problem

The parking space in the four city towns of Goa – Panaji, Mapusa, Margao and Ponda has reached the saturation point. The city municipalities as well as the traffic police don’t seem to have any solution to ease parking in their respective city or towns.

Each civic authority has been found to be fiddling with solutions under a trial and error system – first planning or introducing a system and then dumping or withdrawing the system when it becomes difficult to manage.

Newspaper reports say that the main roads of the city of Panaji – 18^th June Road and M G Road have already exceeded its capacity and to traverse down these roads is exceedingly difficult during the day time on week days.

The only solution the traffic police engage in is clamping of the occasional four wheeler parked wrongly in a no parking area or parked parallel to a parked vehicle on the road. This is no solution to the problem as the vehicle continues to occupy the place until the owner pays a fine and the traffic police arrives to unlock the clamp and release the vehicle.

And often another vehicle comes and parks in the same place and the whole cycle is repeated. The solution to this problem ultimately is not clamping of vehicles and increasing the fine as the vehicle had to be parked somewhere until its owner has finished his business, which often does not take more than a few minutes.

The solution lies with the policy of the government. A casual survey of the city traffic reveals that more than 50 percent of the cars parked in the city belong to shop owners. The shop owner drives down into the city early in the morning and parks the car in a legitimate parking slot.

He then opens his shop and stays in the shop conducting his business until nightfall. So his car occupies the parking space for the whole day and occupies precious space resulting in very little space for the casual visitor who drives down into the city for a few hours on work.

This transit visitor drives into the city on business and needs parking space for less than an hour of so and thus finds no place to park. This transit visitor constitutes in almost 80 percent of the city traffic, and if he had found legitimate parking space would not have spent less than an hour in the city.

But now because he has no parking space, he spends more than that hour just hunting for parking, adding to fuel costs, adding to the traffic and wasting his own precious time. The  problem has thus been created by the vehicles parked in the city the whole day.

The solution to the problem thus lies in providing alternate efficient and proper local transport. The autorickshaw and motorcycle pilots are known to charge exorbitant rates, that the mere realization that you are being fleeced makes people averse to using this system and would prefer to use his own car even though it may cost more.

If there was an efficient shuttle service passing through the major roads in our towns and city, the traffic would definitely ease to a phenomenal extent. People are willing to use public transport as with increasing fuel prices, driving down to work is a necessary evil. If an alternate is in place, people would not only accept it, but would prefer to use it.

But then our planners seem to have other priorities.