BMCs body begins survey to find parking spaces in the city and suburbs

Mumbai Parking Authority will create a database of all parking slots in the city and suburbs; BMC sets aside R3 crore in current year's budget for it

The much-needed provision to set up Mumbai's Parking Authority (MPA), mentioned in the Development Control and Promotion Regulations (DCPR 2034), has finally been implemented. The body, which will create a database of all parking slots in Mumbai, had its first meeting earlier this month. A team of urban planners from it have started surveying the off-street parking spaces in three pilot wards, namely: D ward (Grant Road, Nana Chowk, etc), R Central (Borivli West) and T ward (Mulund) after which they will move on to on-street parking lots.

Barring Ramanath Jha, officer on special duty, who is heading the MPA, the committee includes members from the traffic police, public representatives, officials from the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation's (BMC) Traffic Department, representatives from the Pune-based Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, and from non-profit research organisations like World Resources Institute. The first meeting was held on December 14.

The MPA includes a team of 15 urban planners who will conduct a detailed survey of all the parking lots in the city in coordination with civic officials. "The objective behind creating a comprehensive database of off-street and on street parking lots is to manage the existing chaos, to discourage the use of private cars, and promote public transportation," said a civic official.

Expert speak
In the current year's budget, the BMC has set aside R3 crore for the MPA. The parking lots will be compiled by experts to create a Geographic Information System (GIS) map. Ashok Datar, a transport expert and one of the members of MPA, said that in a city where big projects like the Coastal Road and elevated highways encourage mobility of cars, ensuring adequate parking is essential.

He said that the MPA needs to study the projects where public parking has been created on private space as part of availing the incentive for additional FSI. "There 60 such projects in the city, of which 19 have been handed over to the BMC. Of these, only 4-5 are operational. In some way, public money has been spent for these parking lots and we should figure out why the others are not operational as well," he said.

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