Greater Chennai Corporation plans to add more streets under its on-street parking management scheme by October to declutter city roads.
Currently, the civic body has 5,220 equivalent car spaces (ECS) created on 49 streets in Kodambakkam, Anna Nagar, Teynampet and Adyar. The civic body has made a revenue of 11.34 crore so far from the project that began in 2018. It became operational with a mobile application, CCTVs and manpower in 2019 with 700 car spaces.
J Radhakrishnan, corporation commissioner, told TOI that the revenue has been good, and they will expand the scheme. “The contract ends this October. When we call for fresh tenders, we will add other zones and more car spaces,” he said.
The revenue has seen an increase from 1.5 crore in 2020-2021 to 4.3 crore in 2022-2023. The target is 12,000 car spaces by 2025. A representattive of the contractor SS Tech and Toorq Media Services said when they started, they just had 700 ECS in 2019. It became 2,500 in 2021, 4,000 in 2022 and 5,220 in 2023.
“Our smart parking application has 10,000 downloads only and no one is willing to pay for the parking on their own. Slowly, we had to employ at least four people per street for collection. The collection has improved over the years,” he said.
Chitti Babu, city revenue officer of GCC, said a team visited Bengaluru to study their on-street parking management project. “We have begun studying the roads for marking car spaces. We will soon call for tenders for all the zones and add more contractors. We will learn from our previous mistakes and improve the service further,” he said.
Vandana Balakrishnan, an urban designer, said the idea of charging for surface parking is a step in the right direction. “Expanding the on-street parking in the city is a welcome move. In Bengaluru and New Delhi, on-street parking has been a success and it led to improvement in public transport. Most developed cities followed the same strategy to de-incentivize roadside parking,” she said.
