Study: Indian cars are parked 95% of the time

According to a study by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), an Indian car is parked for over 95% of the time and is driven for less than 5%. The survey was done over a year-long period. On average, a car spends 8,360 hours standing and is only driven for 400 hours in a year.

The study also highlighted a high waste of land usage due to extremely high demand for parking in urban areas. It has been estimated that the annual demand for additional parking spaces can be equivalent to as much as 471 football fields in Delhi, 100 in Chennai, 58 in Chandigarh, and 179 in Gurgaon. Further, cars or 2-wheelers amount to 85% of parking space usage but provide for only 4-15% of travel demand. In contrast, buses account for 4-5% of parking but carry 20 times more passengers than cars.

Parking charges are also one of the reasons why car ownership could get difficult. Across the world, India has one of the cheapest parking rates. Increasing parking rates could deter users from buying more cars, according the the CSE. A parking space utilises space equivalent to a low cost home for the economically weak. This results in lower taxes as well as takes away land for community infrastructure such as schools, healthcare centres, old age home, etc.

One of the solutions for parking is the parking area management plan (PAMP). Some of the ways PAMP can help is by careful planning, surveying of local needs, differential parking rates for prime and farther areas, high penalty for illegal parking, selling of parking spaces separately to make users aware of real cost of parking, promoting sharing of parking facilities, demarcation of emergency lanes in each direction on roads, promotion of public transport and more.