DevelopmentEditors Pick

Parking woes in Malawi’s cities

When Charles Kapito of Chiwembe in Blantyre bought his Toyota Corolla saloon, he expected to ease his transport problems by conveniently driving to his desired destinations. Days after his acquisition, the struggle to find parking space whenever he wants to stop and attend to pressing demands has taken the bliss out of his car ownership experience.

“The agony of driving around trying to locate parking space is a nightmarish experience,” says Kapito, an information technology (IT) technician.

Packing in cities is usually a challenge
Packing in cities is usually a challenge

As if that is not enough, Kapito’s maroon car has a dent on the right rear door courtesy of a minibus that rammed into it while negotiating for parking space at Limbe Market.

Such is the parking dilemma in our cities that cars are parked either tightly next to one another or anyhow, provided authorities do not find the driver and charge them with statutory offences such as road obstruction or dangerous parking.

Malawi’s cities have few spacious car parks such as one at Chichiri Shopping Centre in Blantyre. Much of the parking spaces are mainly on-street-parking areas where lanes on either side of the road are marked out. To compound the situation, several of the parking spaces are dominated with ‘reserved’ signs.

Due to this, getting an empty parking space in Blantyre, Lilongwe and Mzuzu is characterised by delays and inconveniences as one has to drive around looking for such space.

The Nation’s excursion showed that parking spaces along busy places such as banks and shops are usually congested yet management of these establishments reserve these parking spaces for their exclusive use, leaving the visiting customers in parking limbo. As if that is not enough, minibuses compound the problem by parking outside their designated areas.

Among the victims of the parking problem are security guards who are given the additional task of manning the reserved parking spaces. One such guard, on condition of anonymity, laments the dilemma that comes with the issue of accessing parking space.

“Officials order us to reserve their parking space while customers also attack us for denying them empty parking space if the officials are not in. Availability of sufficient parking space would relieve us of this unnecessary agony,” says a guard.

In Mzuzu, Chimwemwe Milulu has had his fair share of the car-owners’ headache courtesy of the parking space hassle.

“There are not many parking spaces here in Mzuzu except at a few public spaces. Most of the spaces are not well paved. There are times when I have been parked in and have had to wait until the other car drives off,” says Milulu.

He adds that it is worrisome to note that Mzuzu is growing fast and the car population is increasing yet the parking infrastructure remains the same.

Odala Mhura, also from Mzuzu, adds that in the evergreen city, people just park anyhow, thereby causing a lot of congestion.

The parking space challenge has not spared the capital city either.

Yusufu Adam, a taxi driver who plies his trade around Lilongwe, laments the lack of parking space.

“Sometimes we are forced to drop customers a distance off from their destination because there is no space for us to park,” he says.

He blames the situation on poor city planning, saying the planners overlooked the issue of parking needs as the city grows.

“We waste precious time just looking for parking space. Also, if you park far from where you are going, you are not secure because you may come back to find your car broken into,” says Adam.

Bester Kasowanjete, a lecturer in physical planning at The Polytechnic, acknowledges the parking quagmire in the country’s cities.

“On-street parking is supposed to cater for short-period parking needs only, like up to 30 minutes. That is why if local authorities want this strategy to be successful it should go together with parking fee policy which is time specific; hence, the longer one parks, the more one pays,” says Kasowanjete.

He advises that each new land development in cities is supposed to abide by the minimum parking requirements of the Town and Country Planning Guidelines and Standards (1987) which specifies the number of parking spaces each new land development should provide.

The lecturer adds that this helps since it takes into account the anticipated traffic the new development is going to attract when it is fully operational.

Furthermore, Kasowanjete calls on the city fathers to give the minimum parking requirement the seriousness it deserves and to effectively manage it so that violators face consequences.

In response to the parking space shortage, town planner at Blantyre City Council, Costly Chanza, says the council is aware of the problem and is trying to sort it out.

“The council decided to allocate a few spaces to the institutions as a short to medium term measure. As a long-term solution, the council will soon be constructing a multi-storey car parkade to accommodate more cars. Possible investors have already been identified,” he says.

Chanza, who was non-committal as to when the parkade project will start, is quoted in The Nation of July 18 2013 as having made the same statement, but to date there is no sign of the project.

But the BCC town planner adds that a one-way traffic system in Blantyre central business district (CBD) will be introduced soon to reduce congestion in the city as well as enforcing traffic by- laws to prevent use of big trucks on CBD roads.

According to Road Traffic and Safety Services (RTSS) public relations officer  Chisomo Chibwana, Malawi has approximately 250 000 private vehicles.

And a September 2014 National Statistics Office (NSO) quarterly bulletin indicates that a total of 27 598 vehicles—excluding government owned —-were registered between January and November 2013.

With such an addition to vehicles on the country’s roads every year, the constant parking space woes means that, for now, motorists have to hassle for the little space available while hoping that parkades such as the one mentioned by Chanza come to fruition.

 

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