Rising number of vehicles eating up residential colonies

Most residential colonies are getting cramped by the day as service lanes on both sides are often packed with vehicles. The problem has grown bigger due to the rising culture of builder flats. The space taken up by one or two families now houses five or six such units.

Most residential colonies are getting cramped by the day as service lanes on both sides are often packed with vehicles. The problem has grown bigger due to the rising culture of builder flats. The space taken up by one or two families now houses five or six such units.

Moreover, an increasing number of families these days are buying cars for individual use, even as the space to park them continues to remain the same.Colonies such as Greater Kailash I, Green Park, Saket, Lajpat Nagar, New Friends Colony and Mayur Vihar among others often witness fights over parking space. Space crunch has been afflicting residential colonies for many years now.

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But even as the problem is compounding with each passing day, the authorities have made no attempt to come up with a parking policy for residential areas.

“Parking inside residential colonies continues to be free, which is why more and more people are buying cars. Why should it remain free? Parking is a luxury so people should be made to buy space,” said Bhure Lal, chairman of Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority (EPCA), a Supreme Court-appointed body to manage parking policies in NCR.

“With no parking policies governing the residential colonies of Delhi, the shortage of parking has become more acute. While residents can use public transport to go to offices and markets, private vehicles have to be parked inside the colonies at the end of the day,” said a senior official.

In the absence of parking facilities such as multi-level parking or underground parking, cars are parked on the colony roads, leaving little space for pedestrians or emergency vehicles."A policy needs to be formulated to discourage purchase of cars when a resident's home has no parking space. We need to promote self-financing schemes for construction of multi-level parkings," said a senior official.

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