Students end up missing their lectures and office goers get late due to illegal auto-parking outside Chickpet metro station.
Aashwin
15/10/2022
Individual auto-drivers and those booked online both park their autos on the narrow road creating a traffic bottleneck. The traffic jam sometimes extends for hours unless the traffic police intervenes to clear the traffic. When auto drivers park their autos in undefined places it leaves no place for pedestrians to walk and other vehicles to pass. Autos are parked in an area of more than 1.5 km.
“We go to college from this road every day. We can’t attend the classes on time due to illegal auto parking,” says Rakesh of Hillside College.
Chickpet traffic police inspector says “the government has not provided any defined areas for auto-parking. We put wheel clamp for illegal auto-parking. We fine five hundred rupees for wrong parking. Under the Chickpet traffic police station we booked 924 cases this year against passenger auto.”
Chickpet metro station is a commercial area so there is also more footfall. Urban planner B.K. Satwik has a solution and reason to the problem. He says “if your pedestrian infrastructure is well established then you can provide your Intermediate Public Transport (IPT), auto parking, at a 100-meter distance and people can walk. If you don’t have pedestrian infrastructure at place, people will always prefer to take autos right outside the entrance or exit of the metro station.”
The auto drivers say they have no choice but to park just outside the metro station as they also need to earn. The road outside the Chickpet metro is also encroached upon by street vendors.
