The Capital looks all set to have a new parking policy meant to
regulate parking on the roads while placing a restraint on use of public
space by private vehicles, thus creating an incentive to use public
transport.

A series of suggestions made at a meeting called by
Lieutenant-Governor Tejendra Khanna on Thursday to address the city’s
parking woes include revision of parking fees to make parking on roads
more expensive than parking at street-level, or in underground and
multi-storey parking lots.

Interestingly, another suggestion
pertained to levy of higher parking fees in all commercial areas and
upscale residential localities. The residential localities comprising
housing colonies, DDA flats, and plotted communities were classified
into three categories with the upscale localities to be charged the
highest.

A presentation on behalf of the Environmental Pollution
(Prevention & Control) Authority (EPCA) was made by its Chairman
Bhure Lal and Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science & Environment.
“Across the world, parking is best managed by ensuring that parking
space is restricted and strictly regulated. Therefore, parking is not
about creating more space for cars, but limiting it, so that it
encourages people to shift to other forms of transportation or pick-ride
systems,” Ms. Narain said.

An official who attended the meeting
said the recommendation to charge parking on city roads at a higher rate
was made considering how congested they were because of motorists’
preference to park vehicles on roads even when authorised parking space
was available nearby.

Another suggestion was to do away with or
transfer to some other agency the Rs.12,000 registration fee levied by
the Delhi Government for each new vehicle to develop parking facilities.
Currently this amount is transferred to the Municipal Corporation of
Delhi but with parking facilities allegedly not improving under the MCD
stewardship, one suggestion at the meeting was to put another agency in
charge of developing parking infrastructure. The other suggestion was to
do away with this levy and instead charge vehicles parking fees on
hourly basis.

Ms. Narain said the L-G directed the DDA to provide
land for cluster bus services which are presently being held up because
of non-availability of land. The L-G also directed that taxis,
auto-rickshaws and cycle-rickshaws not be charged parking fees.The DDA has been directed to provide land to ensure adequate parking facilities for these para-transport facilities.