Cars parked illegally in front of the Johor Baru City Council. Pic by Nur Aisyah Mazalan.
by Chuah Bee Kim
sourced from NST online
This is My Say on the matter. What is yours?
THE Johor Baru City Council’s proposal to introduce time-limit parking has received praises and criticisms.
Those who are working in Singapore and have to park their cars near the Sultan Iskandar building before heading for the Customs, Immigration and Quarantine (CIQ) complex to take a bus to work in the republic, are of course, unhappy with the proposal.
They would need to make alternative plans, should such a law be implemented.
The local council came up with this proposal to emulate cities like Melbourne and Adelaide in Australia and Vancouver, Canada.
The cosmopolitan cities have to introduce this system to free up parking bays for others.
In a city like London, for instance, it is common to pay £40 (about RM210), a day to park their vehicles.
In Malaysia, people are unhappy when they have to pay RM20 for parking their car for a day.
It is not only an inconvenience to those who work in Singapore, even reporters will find it burdensome if there is a time limit.
If we were assigned to cover court cases, we do not know when a session will end.
Sometimes, a case is scheduled for 9am, but if the magistrate or judge is not available or the accused or witness is late, the case will be delayed.
Unforseen circumstances often crops up. A hearing can drag on until 3pm.
If would be a problem for us if time-limit parking were imposed.
Nevertheless, it will not affect me because I seldom drive to the city anyway. It is more convenient to hop onto a bus which will take me to the city, so why should I drive and worry about parking?
For those who do need to drive to Johor Baru, or the occasional shopper for instance, will welcome the idea of time-limit zones as it will be easier to find a parking spot.
A shopper will not spend the entire day in a shopping mall, or their purse will soon become very thin.
So having a time limit is good for a spendthrift shopaholic.
Like everything else, there will always be those who like the idea and those who are against it. You cannot please everyone.
But now the question is, does the local council have the manpower to enforce it?
For a long time, there have been complaints about business operators who place chairs, tables and cones on the roads, yet nothing has changed, except for the occasional raids.
There are endless complaints of of rampant double parking and other forms of illegal parking in the city, yet the problems persist.
If you complain about an overgrown tree, it will take some time before any action is taken.
How many skylifts does MBJB have? How many workers?
All these need to be looked into and carefully considered if Johor Baru wants to look anything like Melbourne.
Since they are already parking in the double yellow lines might as well convert it to legal parking bays. After all that is a primary road. A solution to achieve off street parking is to provide multi-storey parking facility.
ReplyDeleteIchiban