Parking could be a boon

With little signs of any improvement in traffic management, implementation of rules related to fines such as illegal parking falls as an unfair dilemma on the car owning public. In the absence of car parking facilities, the police wreckers appear periodically and the added advantage of video and still photography allow for cases to be filed. It is then up to the car owners to trek it to the relevant authority offices to pay the fine.

There are some malls and hospitals that have paid parking facilities, some of which charge extra for prolonged stays. However, it is the shops on the main roads that don’t have any facility and thereby offering two choices. One is to risk getting fined even for a five-minute stop or look for a better shopping area with parking facilities.

Unfortunately, unlike planned shop-spread in the malls one comes across overseas, almost none of our shopping malls are self-sufficient enough to offer a one-stop service with the full array of shops that is required. Even when it comes to the super-shops there is at times a location issue that prevents any kind of parking. That is the effect of wrongly planned and approved structures that pass as malls. Owners of these buildings offer up shop space to the first taker and it may not include by choice, other service providers such as pharmacies.

Till some form of emphasis is given to the mall constructors to ensure such one-stop service with sufficient parking, the idea of allowing shops to operate becomes a farce. This requires town planners to identify certain spaces for car parking in addition to free-up public space for the same.

It goes without saying that the capital city and the main metropolises have very few available sources for parking and a fresh look is required to create space through acquisition or otherwise.

The situation is no better at the kitchen markets where the roads are often blocked by the traffic of goods carrying vehicles. With public transportation wallowing in its own form of a mess the commuting public too has no streamlined entry or exit plan when they are out to shop.

In the meantime the police action continues albeit sporadically with the knowledge that a portion of the fines are to be distributed among their personnel. In a convoluted way these fines are an added indirect tax on the general public more than anything else. A new approach in Gulshan and Banani where alternate roads have been designated for parking has worked to a certain extent, was worked out by the Gulshan and Banani societies in consultation with police and the City Corporation. This saw the evolution of community policing that addressed the issue of manpower shortage in the police. Encouragingly enough it also allowed for properly identified rickshaw pullers with fixed fares.

The Dhaka Chaka buses are the only ones allowed to operate on a circular route in these areas with only a small number of private buses allowed to use the main roads to cross from Badda up to the airport roads via the Gulshan 1 circle.

The matter gets worse in the old city where police have all but given up on controlling traffic and have left it to community police to sort out the chaos. Until Dhaka South City Corporation gets its act together the car owners will continue to suffer on fines that have been hiked astronomically in recent times.

This is further of a malady that space designated for bus stoppages are taken over by rickshaws and private cars alike and traffic flows taking up clearly identified on-street parking.