Check illegal parking near authorised sites, says Anil Baijal

New Delhi: To ensure smooth rollout of the new parking policy, lieutenant governor (L-G) Anil Baijal on Friday directed the authorities to declare road stretches adjacent to existing parking sites as “no parking zones”.

The L-G also asked them to focus on ensuring adequate parking for people to minimise “inconvenience” to them during the implementation of the new policy.

Mr Baijal issued several other directions at a meeting, which was chaired by him, and attended by transport minister Kailash Gahlot, chief secretary M.M. Kutty, PWD principal secretary Ashwani Kumar and other senior officers.

The policy introduced charges for parking in residential areas and increased the same for road and street parking in the city. These charges would be decided by civic agencies on the basis of a Base Parking Fee, which will be revised annually.

“The L-G directed all the concerned agencies to identify those stretches and declare them as “no parking zones” where multi-level parking or stack parking or surface parking exist so that traffic congestion due to unauthorised parking on these roads can ease,” the L-G’s office stated in a statement.

It stated Mr Baijal also wanted congested road stretches to be mapped by local bodies to identify adequate existing or “potential” parking sites in their vicinity for their development.

“He stated if no nearby sites are available, then those at a reasonable distance could be identified and they could be put into use through integration with a shuttle service,” the statement stated.

Mr Baijal said in view of the large number of vehicles and limited parking sites,  priority should be given to upgrade multi-level stack parking instead of surface parking.

As per the draft policy, the civic agencies will consult RWAs before deciding the parking charges and mode of parking management in residential areas, including outsourcing of collection of parking fees.

The policy proposes that on-street parking for the first hour would be priced at least twice that of off-street and will gradually increase with duration.