With the price of land in Thimphu skyrocketing, people have been making the optimum use of their landholdings compromising parking spaces whenever a building comes up. Tenants are hence forced to park their cars along the roadside causing traffic congestion during rush hour.
This is against the Thromde’s rule of reserving 60 per cent of the plot boundary for the parking purposes or to come up with a basement parking. The Thromde is now restricting parking along the road in the core places where the problem is common. The thromde office announced its latest move in a bid to prevent parking of vehicles by the roadside and to let building owners adhere to the housing rule.
Cars parked along the road is inconvenient for other cars to commute, forcing other cars to slow down and manoeuvre around the parked vehicles causing traffic congestion especially in the morning and evening when office goers are back home and they park their cars along the road. Problems have been reported locally for years, with police called out regularly.
Some house owners say that the construction, especially around Olakha area, is over 10 years old which is why they didn’t build basement as a parking area. However, few also stated that the rule to build individual parking for each unit was there way before the construction boom.
Mindu Dorji, a House Owner in Olakha who constructed his house in 2005 confirms that the rule to reserve parking spaces from the individual plot was in place already. “Thromde had a rule that if we are building 10 unit house, we have to slot 10 parking spaces. For my house, I have 10 parking spaces for individual tenants. But I also can’t say that space is enough. When you are in Thimphu, so many relatives and families come to you. They drive their own car. And in some cases both the spouses have individual cars, which is why the problem keeps coming up,” he said.
Padma Lal, a Flat Owner in Bebena under the Thromde says that the parking problem in the area might be because of the conversion of the area from rural to Thromde. “Before Bebena was considered under the rural area. Maybe this is one of the reasons why they didn’t build a parking area. We have a wall constructed around the boundary. We were asked not to demolish the walls. Even if we build parking, it is a bit inconvenient. If we remove the wall, build parking, the water is going to clog the drain, making the house’s foundation weak,” he added.
Thimphu Thromde says the latest measure will allow them to carry out enforcement activity to keep roads clear of parked cars. They have even circulated notification asking all building owners to use the specified space within the registered plot boundary to park the vehicles. This is in accordance with Thromde’s Development Control Regulation 2016, “a residential building should have one parking slot for each dwelling unit with three or more bedrooms.”
Thimphu Thrompon Kinlay Dorjee says the rationale behind allowing six storied houses in place of five-storied is for the house owners to come up with basement parking and “not to turn it into shops and stores. Now if a house do not have enough space to park the car, and they choose to park along the road and if tenants are fined often, the tenants will also choose to find another house with enough parking. And if the house owners do not get even one month rent, it will be difficult for the owner to pay his loans. That’s why they should understand the complications and they should build a parking basement when we allow them to build six storied houses.”
He added that a time might come when people will have to dismantle shops and stores to convert the ground floor into a parking basement. To this, Thromde has been going around inspecting the areas. Traffic police have been strictly patrolling the areas to enforce the parking restrictions for the past few days.
Samten Dolkar
