AHMEDABAD: The civic body has decided to create vehicle parking areas within public gardens. The space requirement of 1,200 to 1,700 square metres for such parking areas will be made available in municipal gardens close to major roads.
The municipal corporation believes this will ease traffic congestion by providing a space for those who park their vehicles on the roadside.
The experiment will begin with 32 parks and gardens of the city. Director, parks and gardens,
AMC, Jignesh Patel, said that in major gardens, there are spaces that lie mostly unused.
“In some places we found such spaces being used as urinals and dump ground for hawkers. In other places we found people had begun to throw garbage and render the place useless. We will revive such spaces,” said Patel.
He indicated that in gardens such as
Law Garden and
Parimal Garden, as much as 2,000 square metres of space will be available for parking.
“One idea is to introduce bicycle share for public at these spaces,” Patel adds. But the civic body has assured that in historical parks such as
Victoria Garden they will not meddle with existing structure.
“The parking space will be designed in such a way that it does not eat into the existing garden space which is being used by visitors. We assure this,” said Patel.
Even as the municipal corporation is thinking of carving out vehicle parking areas from garden spaces, it is worth mentioning that there is less than 0.7 square metre open space for every Amdavadi, which is too little by any standards. And a majority of open spaces in the city are in the form of gardens
A CEPT study on green infrastructure highlights how in Town Planning (TP) schemes, green infrastructure should be around 5% of total TP scheme area, but studies of Ahmedabad’s TP scheme shows that it is just 2% to 3%. Approximately 40% of open spaces in the city are in the West zone only.
From Law Garden and Parimal Garden, as much as 2,000 square metres of space will be earmarked for parking