On Parking, Promises and Public Space in Islamabad
Urban Bystander
On the first Saturday of August, Islamabad lost one parking space in every four.
Nothing demolished it. No restaurant put chairs on it. No car dealer occupied it overnight. The Capital Development Authority Board simply changed the arithmetic.
Until that morning, high-rise commercial buildings were required to provide one parking space for every seven hundred and fifty square feet. The new requirement is one for every one thousand.
The cars survived the meeting. Only their parking did not.
Consider a large commercial plot with two hundred and seventy thousand square feet of permissible floor area.
Yesterday: 360 spaces. Today: 270. Ninety parking spaces had vanished before the building had even been built.
“They have not vanished,” cackled Mirza Chughal Khor. “They are no longer mandatory.”
The missing quarter appeared to have arrived early.
Missing parking does not disappear. It migrates. First the service road. Then the kerb. Then the footpath. Then the green belt. Sometimes the divider. A restaurant puts out chairs. A shop advances a display. A car takes whatever strip survives between them. Eventually the pedestrian receives what remains.
I-8 Markaz has been demonstrating this for years. CDA officials have acknowledged that insufficient attention was paid to ensuring commercial buildings actually provided and used basement parking, contributing to the traffic mess there. The congestion has become sufficiently dependable for enforcement to become part of the scenery. Traffic Police returns with challans and tow away orders against illegal and double parking. On 11 July, another operation removed obstructing vehicles and instructed citizens to use designated spaces.
Three weeks later, the Board reduced the designated spaces future commercial buildings would be required to provide. One in four.
One arm of government said: park only in designated spaces.
The other said: we shall designate fewer of them.
A private obligation had become a public burden. The basement costs the developer. The road belongs to everybody. Islamabad’s road had been asked to absorb the difference.
Nosy Mynah noted this from the lamppost.
“Why,” she asked, “was the inconvenience to the developer solved before the inconvenience to the city?” Mirza saw no contradiction.
Building Control dealt with buildings. Traffic Police dealt with traffic. If a building produced traffic because it had nowhere to keep its cars, that merely demonstrated successful interdepartmental coordination. Mynah filed one note: Space removed by planning. Car punished by policing.
Constable Tufail stood at the end of the chain with a challan book. He could challan the Civic. He could not challan the building that failed to accommodate it. He certainly could not ticket a ratio.
Basements are expensive. Public roads are already paid for. The Board has not reduced the cost of Islamabad’s parking problem. It has changed who carries it.
The scale of that transfer becomes remarkable. CDA’s Blue Area parking plaza was designed to hold about nine hundred cars. It cost roughly Rs1.3 billion and took years of construction and missed deadlines to produce those spaces. Under the new formula, two million seven hundred thousand square feet of qualifying commercial development would require nine hundred fewer private parking spaces than the old rule.
One parking plaza created with public money. One parking plaza erased by arithmetic.
The first required concrete, ramps, lifts, contractors and several calendars. The second required a Saturday morning.
Among the properties sold at CDA’s commercial auction the following week were three shops inside the Blue Area Parking Plaza. “The Parking Plaza has shops?” Mynah asked.
“Naturally,” said Mirza.
“Does it retain parking?” “You have a very literal relationship with building names.”
Other cities reduce parking minimums too. But they generally connect lower parking provision to public transport, walking, cycling and controls that prevent the surrounding street from becoming the developer’s overflow car park. Islamabad appears to have imported the easier half of the idea. The automobile is invited deeper into the city and then informed that its chair has been removed.
“You make these things sound connected,” Mirza said. Mynah wrote that down too.
The Board had also reconsidered the relationship between compliance and permission. Commercial leaseholders may now renew through an affidavit promising to remove building violations within six months. The present violation. The future compliant.
The same Board, to its credit, gave widows and allottees above sixty in E-12 more time to settle delayed development charges.
One further item in the proceedings was more difficult. CDA had filed an appeal against a High Court order after a delay of more than five hundred and twenty days. A summary proposed identifying those responsible. Whether the Board approved that suggestion could not be confirmed.
The Authority had given itself no affidavit for this.
Outside, another car was looking for somewhere legal to stand.
It would eventually find a service road, a footpath or Constable Tufail.
The car had a registration number.
The decision that put it there did not.
The writer can be reached at [email protected]
