Motorists in Mumbai will heave a sigh of relief that the stiff fine for illegal parking has been reduced by the municipal corporation. The civic body has bowed to the pressure from corporators and motorists.
There is some justification the for reduction in charges. But the idea initiated by municipal commissioner Praveen Pardeshi was basically sound.
He knows about urban development and environment, he is a cyclist and conscious of the great advances made in the West in public transport and curbing of car use.
Car parking is a hot topic at cocktail parties. Every one complains about the shortage of car parking spaces. The trouble is people do not want to pay even reasonable charges for car parking.
Even affluent residents of Altamount Road, the most expensive locality in the country, refused to pay for parking on the road some time ago. So the resistance is not only to paying fines but even normal parking charges.
So many car parks built at great expense lie empty as the civic body knows very well. Builders have made a killing, amassed huge profits by using the increased FSI floor space index incentive given for car parking. All this space lies unused. For example, this has been so for years at the mall near Vidhan Bhavan.
We need to look at the larger picture. The national urban transport policy seeks to discourage car parking provisions and lays down that public transport be given priority. There is a worldwide trend seeking reduced spaces for car parking.
Even the new transit oriented development policy framed by the central government lays down that there should be less parking in areas close to Metro train stations and bus stations.
The expensive Metro railway project in Mumbai is being justified on the ground that it will substantially bring down motor car traffic. In this case, there should be less car parking in Mumbai, not more.
But the state government does something very different in practice. It proposes to create a space for parking 700 cars beneath Mantralaya in Mumbai at a cost of Rs 80 crore.
This is all the more ironical because the state government has dumped its excellent library in Mantralaya into a godown, saying it has no space. So, it is ironic that it has space for motor cars but not books.
A city with growing needs of public transport should provide more space for buses. But instead of creating more such spaces, government policies are reducing these. Worse, precious BEST bus depot space is being used for luxury housing and car parking.
If one drives between Dadar and Bandra, one cannot but notice a high luxury residential tower which has come up on a large portion of the land of the Mahim bus depot.
The depot has remained closed for the past few years causing great inconvenience to commutes. I have personally seen the failed commercialisation of BEST depots at Mahim, Kurla, Marol and Versova.
The BEST undertaking has not even benefited financially from the deal as some developers have not paid crores of rupees of dues.
Americans, despite their prosperity, are driving fewer miles today than during the recession period of 2007-2009 as reported by Wall Street Journal and others. In the West, there is much less fascination for cars now and there is growing demand for public transport.
I was in London and Edinburgh last September and saw how they are promoting public transport and curbing motor cars. Some of the most luxurious hotels do not have any car parking at all while our Taj Mahal hotel, excellent as it is, has virtually taken over a whole street in its vicinity for car parking.
The municipal corporation has come in for criticism from corporators for waiving 50 per cent of charges for parking.
Donald Shoup is the world’s best known authority on car parking and he is dead against creating more parking spaces. He is the emeritus professor of urban planning in UCLA university of California, Los Angeles.
Significantly, his acclaimed book The High Cost of Free Parking, was published by the American Planning Association in 2005.
He argued that parking provisions subsidize cars, increase traffic congestion, pollute the air, encourage sprawl, increase housing costs, degrade urban design, prevent walkability, damage the economy, and penalize people who cannot afford a car.
A flood of recent research has shown they do cause these harmful effects. Parking requirements in zoning ordinances are poisoning our cities with too much parking, he says.
There is much for us to learn from the West. But we are adopting their worst practices, abandoning their best practices.
Vidyadhar Date is the author of the book Traffic in the Era of Climate Change.
