The ‘wheel clamp’ drive introduced by the traffic police has issued nearly 3,000 tickets in a span of four months to people who had haphazardly parked their vehicles on various road sections in the Kathmandu valley.

After not being able to control haphazard parking of four-wheelers, the Metropolitan Traffic Police Division had enforced this new method on the first week of January this year.  After the division started the drive, mayor Bidya Sundar Shakya had publically handed over 50 sets of wheel locks to the division to curb the issue of messy parking in undesignated areas.

“After we introduced the new system to book four-wheelers, the number of haphazardly parking vehicles have gone down,” said SP Jay Raj Sapkota, spokesperson at the division. He said the division has 175 wheel clamps and it has distributed the clamps to all the 42 units across the Kathmandu valley.

Seized two-wheelers can only be claimed after a payment of Rs 1,000 is made; four-wheelers have to pay Rs 3,000.  An one-hour mandatory class also has to be attended by the owners.

Prior to the launch of the wheel clamp drive, the division, in association with the metropolis, used to only control haphazard parking of two-wheelers—by confisticating bikes and taking them away on trucks. Every day, the metropolis deployed 11 city police personnel along with two trucks, and picked up at least 40 two-wheelers parked haphazardly on the streets. “We could only lift randomly parked two-wheelers on our truck. We could not do anything when it came to four-wheelers, but now with the lock system in place we have been able to reduce the number of randomly parked cars,” said Dhanapati Sapkota, chief of Metropolis City Police.