Musical chairs at New Road

Everyone must have played the game of musical chairs during their school days Musical chairs at New Road

Ashraya Dawadi

Published at : March 13, 2014

Updated at : March 13, 2014 10:21

Everyone must have played the game of musical chairs during their school days. If not, one should try it on some picnic day or a family gathering. It’s a simple game in which one has to grab an empty chair and sit on it when walking around a circle of chairs with a bunch of other players. If you cannot grab an empty chair when the music stops, you are out. Similar is the present condition of parking on the street in Kathmandu. One should just keep roaming around the parking area for a period of time just to find a space for parking. And when you find a vacant space, there is always some one else looking for the same space too. In fact, one should be faster and more tactful to get an empty space to park.

Last weekend, I was in the New Road area with some personal chores. Traffic congestion during the evening was at a peak level as always. As I left the main road and tried to park my motorbike, I couldn’t find any space for parking.

So I slowly went from one end of the parking lot to the other end hoping to find a space for parking, but there wasn’t any. I turned back to have a good view so that I could park as soon as some one left the spot. I noticed a few other motorcyclists waiting for a similar opportunity. After waiting for not less than 10 minutes, I finally got a space and parked my bike. When I returned in not more than an hour, I saw that my bike had been dragged out from the place where I had put it and was on the street. And a traffic police officer was standing beside it. As I tried to start my bike, he stopped me and pulled the key out.

“Why did you park outside the yellow line?” he asked angrily. I tried to explain, but he was in no mood to listen. Instead, he threatened to take my bike to Baggikhana. There wasn’t any point in arguing with him. He penalised me for an offence that I had never committed.

Kathmandu Metropolitan City made parking free, but do they know how unmanaged it is? This unsystematic parking has created more difficulties than facilities. As a civil engineering student, I see various options for parking management. Analysing volume-based data and fixing parking areas would be the simplest and fastest solution. A long-term plan would be to build a multi-storied parking building to manage future parking load.

Providing parking facilities outside the core part of the city and making it a “pedestrian zone” or “8 am to 8 pm” traffic-free zone would be the best option. Hence, if Kathmandu Metropolitan City wishes to make life easier for people in the city, now is the time for them to come up with a better idea for parking management.