BMC revises policy, island city to get 500 parking slots

For those living in the island city, buying a car may be easy but finding parking space is fast becoming a nightmare.

The situation has become so bad that every car owner in the city thinks twice before driving to south Mumbai. But a scheme launched by Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) will soon provide parking space for 500 carts in multi-storey parking lots at Lower Parel.

The scheme consists of providing extra Floor Space Index (FSI) as incentive in return for constructing and handing over public parking lots to the civic body.

The move has received a huge response from developers keen to bag extra FSI. For the island city, the BMC has received 39 proposals which will free up 28,538 parking spaces. Of these proposals, 16 have been cleared and are under construction.

“The first lot located in the Apollo Mill Compound at Lower Parel is completed and will be handed over to the BMC very soon,” said Aseem Gupta, additional municipal commissioner.

The developer has completed the construction and there is now parking capacity for more than 500 cars, of which 500 spots will be handed over to the BMC,” he added.

The state has given priority to clearing civic proposals for parking space within a 6 sq km radius of Parel, Dadar, Lower Parel and Worli.

The central business district has shifted to these areas — earlier called Girangaon — and has seen mushrooming of office spaces following the redevelopment in Mumbai in the last few years.

It was found that developers were eyeing the extra FSI incentive only in city areas, while parking spaces in the Lower Parel-Worli area were unused. Subsequently, the state scrapped the policy in April 2011, after private players began taking advantage of the Development Control Rules  33(24).

When the scheme was first launched, it was expected to create 25,000 parking slots in the city.