Parking chaos grips city: Commuters struggle, MC loses revenue

Chandigarh: The city’s paid parking system is deteriorating from bad to worse thanks to the municipal corporation’s failure to hire a managing agency. This is affecting both the commuters and the civic body. While it’s an everyday struggle for commuters to find proper parking spaces, the MC is losing out on revenue by managing the parking lots on its own.
The acute chaos in key commercial markets has become a permanent issue, with haphazardly parked vehicles visible everywhere without any intervention. Also, the traffic police have failed to control illegal parking on unauthorised roads, not only in commercial areas but also in many residential areas, where illegal parking outside houses is now rampant.
In the absence of a paid parking contractor, the MC is operating the parking lots with its own engineering department employees and hiring additional personnel from outside. Due to limited staff, they are struggling to manage the parking lots effectively, especially in crowded commercial areas. At times, situation becomes chaotic.
Vehicles can be seen parked in non-parking areas at commercial and residential places across the city. In residential areas, the parking problem has acquired a serious tone in most parts of the city. The situation is particularly dire in residential areas near commercial zones.

In the southern sectors and Manimajra, many areas are blocked as vehicles are parked there during night hours. With no other option, people park their vehicles on the roads, creating major problems for commuters at night, even as several roads remain almost blocked. In commercial areas also, unauthorised parking is rampant as there is no check by the traffic police.
Significantly, no concrete policy decision has been made so far to manage parking in the city more effectively, and the detailed parking policy launched by the Chandigarh administration in 2021 remains just on paper.
Although the Chandigarh administration has held multiple meetings in the past with various departments to address the parking problem, nothing has been implemented on the ground to date.
Issues such as community parking in residential areas, constructing ample parking spaces in commercial areas, improving public transport, imposing congestion charges in main commercial areas, and other related points have been discussed multiple times over the past few years. However, none of these ideas have materialised properly on the ground, and parking remains an unsolved issue.
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Since Chandigarh has the highest per capita vehicle ownership, thousands of vehicles pass through the city daily. As the joint capital of both Punjab and Haryana, Chandigarh hosts multiple offices for these states, and employees from both states visit the city regularly. This influx of vehicles is a major reason for the parking chaos in the city.
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A couple of years ago, the MC planned to construct multilevel parking in Manimajra. Although the process began and four agencies expressed interest in constructing underground multilevel parking, the project was later scrapped due to a non-feasible site and other issues. Manimajra is one of the busiest areas of the city, and there is no proper parking area in either commercial or residential zones.