Expensive pause

The first automated parking meters in Chennai came up sometime in October last year. Four of them were installed in Mylapore's North Mada Street, where parking has traditionally been quite haphazard. They haven't done away with the parking attendent completely, however. The idea with these meters is to pay the money for the duration you intend parking and leave that ticket on your vehicle's dashboard. The parking attendent's job is to make sure that all parked vehicles show off a valid ticket on their dashboards.

Theoretically, it is meant to tighten up cash collections and reduce the risk of parking attendants losing - or being robbed of - the fee they collect through the day. The Corporation hasn't yet released any results of how things have changed in the three months this system has been in operation at Mylapore, T.Nagar and Taramani, but I'm guessing they will not be in a hurry to rip these out and go back to the attendant-only system, which was being run by the Tamil Nadu Ex-servicemen Corporation (TEXCO). The firm supplying these parking meters is getting ready to install them at a dozen more locations.

One aspect that has gone almost unnoticed is that the parking fee has, from one perspective, gone up six-fold: earlier, TEXCO's authorised rate was Rs.5 for a maximum of six hours. It has now become Rs.5 for every hour - and you can park in one slot for only 3 hours at a stretch!