Parking is a luxury: we should be paying more for it

Peter Hellyer

Like most Abu Dhabi residents who drive a car, I have problems with the increasing traffic and with the difficulty of finding parking.

I’m not as badly off as many: my office off Muroor Road has adequate parking space, and at home there’s space on a nearby sandy patch that I can use, now that the completion of a couple of new buildings near by has meant that the parking on a side road is generally full up.

When I need to go downtown to the central area, I often put it off for days because I can’t face the prospect of driving round and round looking for a legal parking spot, although I am getting used to the idea of using underground car parks.

I have friends living on Airport Road who drive around for up to half an hour each time they are trying to park near their homes. Once they manage to find a spot in the late afternoon or early evening, they are effectively stuck at home until the next morning, unless they want to take a taxi to go somewhere.

The lack of parking spaces leads to illegal parking on kerbs, down the centre lines of narrow roads and a multitude of other sins. It can be expensive, too, with the police now handing out many more fines than used to be the case – often unnecessarily, in my view, to drivers who aren’t actually blocking any access but are just trying to make use of a tiny scrap of space. Where there is some space on a patch of sand across a kerb or pavement, it really shouldn’t be an offence to drive up and over on to it. The alleged “damage” to the kerb is pretty minim
It’s infuriating for residents, of course, that the network of small roads off the main thoroughfares gets so clogged by parking, but it’s dangerous too. One day there’s going to be a major fire in a building in one of these areas, and the fire engines will simply be unable to get through. And then, of course, Civil Defense will be blamed because they didn’t arrive quickly enough.

This week, so a story in Saturday’s issue of The National tells me, we can expect the first phase of a paid parking system to be introduced. It’s about time – I wish it had been introduced much earlier, and the parking meters have been in place for quite some time. It’s not going to solve the problem – the new scheme will, apparently, only run from 8am to 9pm, except on holidays and Fridays, so there’ll be no improvement whatsoever in terms of where people park their cars at night. But it’s a start.

The underlying problem, of course, is that the number of cars in the city has risen so fast in recent years that it has been utterly impossible to provide additional parking spaces to keep pace with demand. The imposition of what seems to be a general rule that new buildings should have underground car parks has slowed down, but certainly hasn’t halted, the growth of the problem. The introduction of the excellent bus service has been beneficial, but has, I suspect, not taken many private cars off the road, since its users generally don’t own cars.

In my view, a whole range of fairly drastic decisions need to be taken by the Government over the next few years, to provide any chance of bringing some kind of order into the situation. Among them I would suggest, and in no particular order of importance, might be the following: compulsory purchase of some of the smaller buildings along main streets, so that more car parks can be built; a swingeing increase – and I mean swingeing – in what it costs to re-register a vehicle every year; a drive to encourage major employers to move out of the city centre; rapid decisions to proceed with the expansion of the public transport system.

An easier option might be to grab some of the space now allocated to parks and gardens, but I would be reluctant to see that. The city needs those spaces, and so do its inhabitants. Any such drastic decisions, though, aren’t simply a matter of political will, which is undoubtedly there anyway. Some will take a lot of money to achieve and they will have a knock-on effect across the whole of the city’s urban planning. They’ll take time too – there is no easy fix to this problem, here or in any other major city anywhere in the world.

There are steps that employers, both government and private, could take to help the situation. In particular, it wouldn’t do any harm to encourage more employers to adopt a system of flexible working hours or to introduce schemes whereby some employees could work, for some of the time at least, from home.

In the world of the internet and good telecommunications, that is surely feasible for a few thousand office employees – and it might cut down both the traffic jams as offices open and close and the panic trying to find a place to park in case you’re five minutes late clocking in.

That’s for the future, though.

For the moment, we’re just going to have to grin and bear the problems. That, I’m afraid, is going to involve getting used to paying for parking: not just two or three dirhams an hour from 8am to 9pm, but substantially more – and eventually for overnight parking as well (the sooner the better in downtown areas, in my view). There’s simply not going to be any alternative.

Little schemes here and there, like putting a Band-Aid on the problem, aren’t going to solve the parking chaos, even if they can slow down the rate at which it continues to get worse. Otherwise, a few years from now, downtown Abu Dhabi will have reached a state of gridlock, and that would be in no one’s interest.







*Published in the UAE's THE NATIONAL on September 29, 2009. Peter Hellyer is a writer and consultant specializing in the UAE’s heritage and environment and has written extensively on the country’s social, political and economic development.