Apartments, not individual houses, take to BBMP’s multilevel mechanical car parking move

BBMP relaxes stilt height for multilevel car parking, aiming to address parking issues in Bengaluru, but challenges remain.

The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, in its recently presented city budget, has announced a relaxation in the height of the stilt (ground-level parking) from 3 metres to 4.5 metres to accommodate a multilevel mechanical car parking. This aims to enable two cars to be parked one over the other. As an incentive, it has said the additional 1.5 metres increase in the height would not be considered in the overall height of the building. 

While this proposal has got a good response from builders of apartments, where parking space is premium and rationed, it doesn’t seem to have elicited the same kind of response from individual home builders, whom the civic budget says it is aimed at. 

“In cities, it’s common for the residents to park their vehicles on the roadside near their homes, which has prevented the road widening projects aimed at improving traffic flow,” the budget speech said, calling the move to increase the stilt height to 4.5 metres a “revolutionary step” to address this. 

But without a policy that will penalize roadside parking of cars in the residential bylanes, it is unlikely that builders of individual houses will invest extra to put up a multilevel mechanical car parking facility, experts point out. At present, the cost of installing one such system for two cars stacked one above the other ranges between ₹1 lakh to ₹3 lakh, sources in the realty industry said. 

Traffic expert M. N. Srihari said legally too, roads are meant for traffic alone and footpaths for pedestrians and parking doesn’t figure in the scheme of things and only a strict enforcement of this can solve the parking issue. “When there is no enforcement and one can park multiple cars on the road in front of their houses, why would anyone invest more to provide for more parking on their premises? This needs radical solutions, like linking the sale of cars to showing proof of parking space on one’s premises. In the absence of such nudges, providing for increasing the stilt height alone will not help at all,” he said. 

Chief Civic Commissioner Tushar Giri Nath said that while they had first brought in a policy that will provide for multilevel mechanical car parking in residential buildings, policies to disincentivise parking the roadside will likely follow at a later stage. “We have some ideas that are presently being considered. For instance, we are thinking of providing owners of empty sites in an area rights to put up multilevel mechanical car parking facilities to park cars for a charge and give them rights to tow all cars on the roadside in a particular small area,” he said. 

Apartments are more likely to make the best use of leniency shown in the stilt height. “In apartments today, each flat has one parking slot. But in most mid-range and high-end apartments, families have both husband and wife working. They have more than one car and even a two-wheeler and parking is a big problem. Now with relaxation in the stilt height, we can provide parking for two cars in the same space. This will also increase the marketability of these flats,” said Suresh Hari, Confederation of Real Estate Developers’ Associations of India (CREDAI), Karnataka.