Cars Galore Lead to Parking Crunch in the Colony
No Outside Help Will Solve the Problem Residents Themselves Will Have to Adjust to Each Other’s Needs
An unfortunate incident happened on 26 Dec when our colony resident Raman’s son parked his car across the road along the park in front of E 13/7. The staff of E 13/7 requested him to remove his car and not park it there but he refused by exclaiming that he will be back in a short while. This did not go down well with the staff and they got into a brawl with the son and beat him up badly.
Raman posted a note on the whatsapp group that his son was at the police station with a bleeding hand (see pix). He questioned if owners have right on the MCD land also? While going to the press we are not sure what finally happened but the incident was unfortunate because it seems the staff’s brief was that they should not allow any outsider’s car to be parked there and reserve it only for their cars.
Residents are increasingly experiencing a shortage of parking space in the colony.
There is really no shortage of space, as most houses face a park; it is the increasing number and the size of the cars which is the main cause of the crunch. Besides, several residents have made encroachments in front of their homes and thus further reduced the available space.
There are a few residents who even put ‘gumlas’ (flower pots) in front of their houses to reserve the scarce parking space. The VVWA committee has been discussing this issue in its executive committee meetings. No concrete answer has been forthcoming. Seven years back the then VVWA Committee the committee had long time back decided to targeted illegal encroachments made in front of homes, beginning from the arterial roads which are less wide and have houses on both sides and cars parked on both sides. It even requested the MCD to physically remove the encroachments. Residents at one time had to pay a heavy price for the bulldozing of their encroachments.
However, it is realised that any physical action by MCD does not solve the problem in the long term. Experience has shown that most often if encroachments are removed by force, they are likely to be rebuilt by the erring residents. The best is when residents themselves see that they should not fight with each other but adjust to each other’s needs. They should create as much parking space as possible within their boundary walls, take down their own encroachments, flower pots, be generous with neighbours’ visitors and allow them to park, and refrain from buying cars if they don’t have enough parking space inside or in front of their homes.
Legally speaking, the space outside the walls of a residence is public property and doesn’t belong to the resident and he or she does not have any right over it. However, there is an unwritten understanding that the resident can park his cars outside his house and as neighbours we usually respect that. But to put up signs saying “This space is reserved for so and so” or placing gumlas to block public space is a huge no-no and these things invite unnecessary trouble.
Residents building new houses or redoing their old homes construct stilt parking. They construct a new house with the ground floor reserved for car parking. Unfortunately, only a few park their cars inside on the stilts and most others park their cars outside and use the stilts for other purposes.
The worst is that the entire front of the house is taken over by the sliding door and that part of the road cannot be used for parking.
However, some residents have voluntarily removed all their gardens in front of the houses and made the road wider, with better access. These are some examples which if we all follow will solve the problem in right earnest. If we bear with one another, we will all benefit and community living will be a joy.
The following is a letter from an aggrieved resident:
“This happened one evening when my mother and I were returning home from the market and we saw a gentleman parking his car right in the front of the entrance of our house. On various other occasions we have witnessed cars parked on roads that blocked the passage and restricted movement causing trouble to other residents.”
“My mother, politely, asked the gentleman to park his car in some other area to avoid inconvenience to us, he bluntly refused and said that it will be difficult for him to move the car the next morning as it usually gets trapped by other cars parked haphazardly. Though he later moved his car and parked it in an appropriate area after much space hunting, the problem of too little space for car parking (or too many cars to be parked in a limited area) is a growing menace in our colony.”
“It is not only our area that often suffers from parking menace, but the entire colony. The arterial roads are narrowed down because of cars parked on both sides of the road which create chaos on the roads, restricting the movement of vehicles and pedestrians. And when there are two or more vehicles coming from opposite directions, it becomes a dire situation for the drivers who cannot move their cars in any direction. It creates such a mess that almost all pedestrians engage in directing the drivers to either move back or forward, or to turn left or right, to make space for the other vehicle to cross. Myriad times it happens that a vehicle, in such a hideous situation, bangs into another.”
The solutions to these problems are:
1. A law should be made on the limit to the number of cars a family can own based on the size of plot. It will not only increase parking space in the colony, but also decrease traffic on the roads and less black clouds of exhaust will spew into the environment;
2. Residents should be deterred from ‘reserving’ an area for their car(s). In case they do, action should be taken against them as that specific area is not their property unless they park their cars inside their homes.
3. All the cars in the colony should have stickers on the windscreens mentioning the house number and mobile number of the owner of the car so that he can be contacted and moved during an emergency if another car has been blocked by it.
