Next time you park your car in a no-parking zone and can’t find it when you return, visit the nearest traffic police station. It will have been towed away as police reintroduce the practice of towing away wrongly parked vehicles. Fourteen new ‘Tigers’ have been ordered to cope with illegally parked cars that have become a major problem as they impede the smooth movement of traffic. The traffic police estimate that 40 per cent of the road is occupied by parked vehicles.
M. A. Saleem, Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic) said that due to the shortage of towing vans, the number of illegally parked vehicles had increased. The additional tow vans will help control this problem. Towing away of cars was scaled down in Bengaluru after there were complaints that the towing vehicles were damaging the cars. Six months ago, better designed towing vehicles were inducted which will not cause any damage to the cars. “The new vehicles will be somewhat similar. The number of parking offences has gone up in the city. In 2011, 6,96,699 cases of wrong parking were booked and this year around eight lakh have been booked,” Mr Saleem said.Towing away vehicles is one method of discouraging drivers from parking on roads and footpaths. Another is clamping, and the police plan to step this up too. “We have ordered 500 new clamps which will be used to regulate parking in the city areas,” Mr Saleem said.
Traffic experts are in favour of large multi-storey parking complexes outside the central business district (CBD). “There was a proposal to ban movement of cars in CBD during peak hours at weekends. But the government is not doing anything to restrict the traffic movement in the CBD areas. The parking in CBD has become a major problem and double parking is causing traffic to slow down on many roads,” said a traffic expert.