Vehicles parked in congested old city lanes inconveniences pedestrians

Vikram Sharma

Tribune News Service

Jammu, November 14

While traffic rules have become stringent and people violating norms are being penalised through heavy challans, vehicle owners having no parking space have started lining their vehicles in congested lanes and by-lanes.

This has inconvenienced the movement of pedestrians in the lanes and by-lanes who lament about the congested lanes leading to the blockade.

“To escape penalty, the vehicle owners who used to park their vehicles alongside the road earlier, now have started parking their vehicles in the congested lanes making things difficult for us,” said Ram Prakash, a resident of Pacca Danga.

Almost every household in old Jammu city has a private vehicle, but due to old construction of houses and mohallas, none have a space to park their vehicles .

Besides, the lanes and by-lanes running through these congested mohallas are very narrow, which only cater to the movement of the pedestrian.

“Besides great difficulty in the movement, if a person falls sick, it becomes impossible to shift him/her to a hospital. We have to knock on the doors of the vehicle owners who sometimes are not available to move the parked vehicle,” said Rakesh Anand, a resident of Talab Tillo.

A traffic official expressed department’s inability to have any rule in place to penalise or push the vehicle out of the mohalla to ease the movement of the people.

“We are directed to pick up the vehicles parked alongside the road, but for lifting a vehicle from inside a mohalla, the department has no provision,” he said .

Brij Mohan, a senior citizen at Old Rehari, said though erratic and random parking of vehicles inside the mohallas has created great inconvenience for the residents in Old Jammu city, the government too is not serious to acknowledge the problem.

“There is an urgent need for the expansion of old city, besides construction of more parking lots. If this does not happen, fast addition of vehicles will lead to complete chaos soon,” said Brij Mohan.