Car parking fee raised

LAHORE: The Lahore Parking Company (LePark) has raised the car parking fee by 50 per cent. The city government has issued a notification fixing the fee at Rs30 a car.

Speaking at a press conference on Thursday, LePark chairman Muhammad Nauman said the revision would help enhance service delivery. “The company is developing new parking spaces to ease traffic congestion,” he said. Earlier, speaking to The Express Tribune LePark acting chief executive officer Usman Qayyum had said that on average the company earned Rs50 to Rs60 million a year. Nearly 75 per cent of the amount went to the city government and the remaining was spent on salaries and operational expenditures, he had said.

Qayyum had said the company proposed to provide parking spaces and plazas on Hall Road, Fane Road and at Ittefaq Hospital, Awain-i-Adl and Nila Gumbad. “Most of these plazas will be constructed on the build-own-transfer (BOT) basis,” he had maintained.

Qayyum said that on average the LePark served nearly 50,000 cars and motorcycles a day. He said the company was facing problems as most parking spaces along the Orange Line Metro Train (OLMT) route had been closed owing to construction work. Some of the spaces had been closed for security reasons, he said. Qayyum said the company had started constructing Pakistan’s first rotary car parking (similar to Ferris-wheel) facility at Liberty Market that would hold up to 12 cars using the space required to park two vehicles in a conventional lot.

LePark says it has been suffering a loss of nearly one-fourth of its revenue owing to closure of parking spaces.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 12^th, 2016.