KMC gets only 200 applications for night parking in two years

Kolkata: With only 200 plus car owners opting for the night car parking facility across the city, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation decided to book the owner of an illegally parked car at night based on feeds from local KMC offices and the Kolkata Police traffic wing. The KMC reserves the right to penalise the owner of such an illegally parked vehicle.The KMC car parking department, in association with the Kolkata Police traffic wing, will need to streamline night car parking in areas where a major portion of the road width and pavements are occupied by illegally parked cars. According to an agreement, the KP traffic wing will share its feeds from the CCTV network, and the same will be used to book the owners of illegally parked cars at night, said a KMC car parking department official.Besides taking the feeds from the police, the KMC car parking department will send its inspectors to take photos of illegally parked cars and send the numbers of the cars to the civic body's IT department to store them. The numbers clicked will be tallied with the police feeds, said a civic official.At present, the KMC car parking department inspectors conduct surprise, area-wise raids at night and tow away cars that are parked in areas which do not fall under the authorised parking zones. Trinamool Congress councillor Rupak Ganguly on Wednesday raised a query about the civic body's plan to curb night parking woes on lanes that are putting citizens into major trouble, as even ambulances are being resisted from entering a locality to ferry serious patients. In reply, Mayor Firhad Hakim said night parking was not allowed on lanes that are not at least 18 feet wide. "We will need to take action against owners of illegally parked cars on roads and lanes," Hakim said."Once the violators are fixed, we will also raise awareness, urging owners to apply for permission for night parking. This will act as a wake-up call for owners. We plan to include both commercial and private vehicles, but will concentrate on commercial vehicles to begin with," explained a KMC official.KMC reopened night car parking lots in 2022, after a nearly two-year gap following the pandemic. The 20-22 night parking lots are in areas like Strand Road, Burrabazar-Chitpore belt, Bentinck Street, Ganesh Chandra Avenue, College Street, Amherst Street, SN Banerjee Road, Bhowanipore, Harish Mukherjee Road, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Road, among others, and can accommodate 2,500 vehicles, most of them commercial. While this issue was resolved, the problem of parking private cars in neighbourhoods by local residents persists in large sections of central Kolkata, where many homes do not have garages, as well as Bhowanipore and other old neighbourhoods in south Kolkata.There is also a high-rise apartment in Ballygunge Circular Road opposite Science College where cars are parked on the pavement because the building, constructed in the 1970s, did not have any provision for parking cars.