KARACHI: The traffic police department has raised questions over the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation’s process of awarding charged parking contracts in more than 20 “downtown areas” violating the laid down procedure that includes consultation with the department before finalising such a deal, insisting that it will cause further traffic chaos on important roads of the city, it emerged on Tuesday.

In a recent letter to the Sindh IG, the DIG Traffic complained that despite several requests to the quarters concerned, the DG Parking of KMC had once again awarded charged parking contracts of 21 locations in downtown areas without consultation with the traffic police.

“It’s is pertinent to mention here that the roads approved for charged parking are already encroached, narrow and overcrowded from traffic point of view. Awarding of charged parking contracts in these congested areas will further deteriorate the situation,” states the letter.

Though the letter did not mention those “21 downtown locations”, it warned that should the contractors be allowed to implement the deal the traffic flow would be badly affected creating gridlock on key road links.

“Besides this, the authority concerned has also failed to clear whether the contractor will park vehicles in single lane or otherwise,” said the DIG Traffic to the Sindh IG in the letter.

“It has been experienced that contractors allow double and even triple parking lanes on the roads by taking advantage of such ambiguous permissions causing hindrance in the smooth flow of vehicular traffic.”

While perusing the contents of the letter, the traffic authorities come across as aggressive against the KMC move as they want Sindh IG to immediately suspend the recent parking contracts awarded by the municipal organisation otherwise they warned of severe after-effects in the overall city traffic situation in case of its execution.

“Keeping in view the above, it is requested that the matter may kindly be moved to the Commissioner Karachi that the operation of charged parking in these objectionable areas may be suspended unless and until the feasibility report is obtained from traffic police department,” said the DIG Traffic.

The letter also highlights another pertinent parking space issue along with a proposal that could ease off the parking crisis in the downtown areas. The traffic authorities mention more than 25 buildings in Saddar where parking spaces have been occupied by traders for commercial purposes.

“There are 27 commercial buildings located in Saddar area where approved parking spaces have been occupied by owners, builders and tenants by converting them into shops and godowns. In this connection, it is submitted that due to misuse of approved parking spaces in these commercial buildings people are constrained to park their vehicles on road side which causes traffic jam throughout the city centre,” states the letter.

The DIG Traffic suggested a “joint operation” of law enforcement agencies and KMC’s relevant body to restore parking spaces in these 27 buildings.

Published in Dawn, July 22th, 2015

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