Parking auction: One or two companies to operate parking facilities

Bidding conditions likely to disqualify local companies from auction.

LAHORE:

The Lahore Parking Company, or LePark, has decided to auction off contracts for the operation of parking lots in the city to no more than two companies, likely foreign ones.

Earlier, the company had divided the city into 28 zones and planned to auction off the parking contracts for each zone separately. However, it has now decided to simplify matters and have just two zones, the bidding requirements for which will be advertised on January 11, said LePark Managing Director Mian Shakeel.

“Two companies or even one company could take over all the parking lots in the city,” Shakeel said. “It will be easier this way than having 28 different companies operating parking facilities in Lahore.”

He said that on a recent trip to Istanbul, Turkish officials had advised them not to divide Lahore into too many zones, as a similar experiment in Istanbul had failed. Now, the entire city is one zone with parking controlled by one company.

Additionally, conducting separate auctions for each of the 28 zones would have been very time consuming, he said. Now, the parking facilities in both zones will be auctioned in one go.

The managing director said that LePark would take over 290 parking lots in Lahore from the District Office of Public Facilities. It had identified another 47 parking areas in the city and 337 parking lots in total would be auctioned off, roughly divided in half between the two zones.



So far, LePark has taken over supervision of eight parking lots in the city, other than the Liberty Market parking area. It recently took over Moon Market in Iqbal Town, the NADRA Office on Peco Road, Pace Centre in Gulberg, the EFU building on Jail Road, Eden Heights on Jail Road, the Punjab Medical Complex on Jail Road, Cardex Hospital on Jail Road, and Nida Market on Empress Road. The Moon Market parking lot was being operated by a local contractor – the contract has now been cancelled – while the rest were being run on a self-collection basis. LePark is taking over one or two parking lots a day and plans to take charge of 38 by the end of this month.

After the adverts are published on January 11, companies will have one month to submit expressions of interest (EOIs), said Shakeel. The ads will detail the number of parking lots in each zone, their capacity, and the parking fees (Rs20 for cars, Rs10 for motorbikes).

Any company intending to take part in the auction must have at least five years of experience of handling parking in metropolitan areas, Shakeel said.

It would have to have a minimum financial worth and bigger companies would be preferred. “It should also have expertise in automation,” he added, as the company would need to automate the facilities it takes over, along the lines of the Liberty parking lot, recently automated by a Turkish company. The contracts will be awarded for five years.

The conditions for the bidders are likely to disqualify local companies from participating. Sabir Jutt, the vice president of what he claimed was the city’s only parking union, said that the government had no consideration for the livelihoods of local parking contractors.

He also expressed doubt that foreign companies could handle local parking facilities. “Other than Liberty, no other parking lot has a proper entrance or exit. They can’t be given to foreign companies,” he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 9^th, 2013.