NEWS INTERNATIONAL PARKING
NEW SYSTEM
Seema Singh reports from Delhi, where innovation is improving the city’s congestion problems
punches
ABOVE ITS WEIGHT M
otorists in India are a long- suffering bunch; Delhi is rated as one of the worst cities
in which to fi nd a parking space, and the time spent circling, searching for spaces is mirrored by other cities across the country. The experience may range from delayed meetings to tyres defl ated by angry residents; from fi nes in no-parking zones to vehicles getting towed away from that no-man’s land – the space that borders the parking and no-parking zone. With 800,000 cars and 15m two- wheelers being added to Indian roads annually, fi nding a parking space is a gruelling battle.
But residents of Delhi, especially those who work or live in Connaught Place, have enjoyed some respite. The employment of a fully automated public car parking system on Baba Kharak Singh Marg now allows 1,400 cars to be parked on eight fl oors of a 10-storey building (the other two fl oors are a shopping complex).
Successful start
ABOUT the AUTHOR: Seema Singh is a journalist with the newspaper and online news website Forbes India
Car owners punch a card and leave their vehicle at an entry point pallet (a steel plate). A lift moves the pallet to an available parking slot. On return, owners punch their card again and the vehicle is retrieved within three minutes, explains Ranjit Date, founder-president of Precision Automation and Robotics India (PARI), a Pune fi rm that
designed and developed the parking system. The New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) land on which this is built has been developed by real estate company DLF. The cost for car owners? A mere Rupees (Rs) 10 per hour (11p). This is the price DLF is charging to encourage car owners to use this facility. Builders and PARI say Rs 50 an hour is a more realistic price. A similar system, for 50 cars, at Chennai’s Saravana mall has enjoyed a successful fi rst 18 months of operation. So far, NDMC has tendered for 43 public parking plots, but this is the fi rst to open for use. It is to be followed by a similar facility for 800 cars in Sarojini Nagar, also developed by DLF. Date is getting dozens of such proposals, and the Delhi project is a test, not only for PARI but also for DLF and NDMC, to see if this is the right approach to solving the parking problem. PARI has served the automotive sector with its industrial automation solutions for more than a decade. In 2007, its two founders, Date and Mangesh Kale, decided that being sector-specifi c wasn’t a good idea. The early impact of the downturn on the automotive sector proved them right. In 2008, they started to build automated parking systems.
The cheaper option PARI’s fl agship product, a fully automated parking system, costs half as much as global alternatives. The system multiplies a land’s car parking capacity by 16: If a plot can take 50 cars, the automated system can take 800. But, at a cost of Rs 500,000 (£5,785) lakh a spot, one could argue it’s for developers with deep pockets. Date doesn’t agree. It’s an infrastructure issue; it’s no longer economics, but public policy. ‘It can solve the parking problem overnight,’ he says. SS
12
JUNE 2012
www.britishparking.co.uk
Kenneth Dedeu /
shutterstock.com
JeremyRichards /
shutterstock.com
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