Sunday, November 18, 2007 Sun.star Essay: Parking By Erma M. Cuizon Sun.star essay
IMAGINE a magic situation. You’re driving downtown and find (most naturally) not enough space where to park. You next press a button after you get out of the car and the car shrinks expectedly into a thin envelope which you put into your pocket as you go on with your business in the building across the street.
When you come back down, you get the envelope from your pocket and put it on the ground. It grows bulk and steel back into the reality of a car. You go in and drive away. A dream.
What's not a dream is an ongoing project of the Massachusets Institute of Technology---a design of a two-seater electric vehicle which you could collapse at the sidestreet. Like a shopping cart, the City Car, as the dreamed-of collapsible vehicle is called, is thus stacked with others fitting into a park area which has enough space for everyone.
But let’s go back to reality, pending the final step of the MIT project. The City Car is meant only for two while Filipinos move in families of five or more. So then a family would need more than one City Car.
But ten City Cars on electric power would not destroy the atmosphere the way one diesel-run car can, an open-minded motorist would say.
And parking is a real problem even in our small city. In the short span of a street near the office, like in some other streets, there’s double parking at past 5 in the afternoon when the police isn’t looking. This is besides the fact that, at sundown, the street becomes a hangout of friends and families strolling after supper. You certainly can only dream of space to park in if you’re a late comer or you don’t live there.
It might as well have been a parking street, the city could have earned from it since parking is now an industry.
If parking were free 99 percent of the space (as it’s said in the case of the US), then the number of vehicles would soar and pollution in the city thickens in a second.
The matter of parking, as it is dealt with, can determine the kind of life we will live in. Parking forms the atmosphere a big or small city develops. Free off- and on-street parking, illegal parking, and very poor public transpo services encourage the increase of cars in the city, which results in parking problems and sorely builds up pollution and traffic.
In some German cities, people spend one hour of traffic standstill every week, or 65 hours a year stuck up on the road in a lifetime. And this, of course, doesn’t include driving (or moving) time. I did experience a standstill for 30 minutes in Manila, and that was even some years back when cars were surely less in number.
One solution is to discourage use of cars in the downtown areas. From a suburb in Sydney, Australia we drove for almost an hour towards a train station, left the car in a park area, got on the train and did the downtown in public transpo and on foot. It would have taken us more hours to drive all the way to the commercial center and look for a parking space. Then we’d have time left only to buy an Australian pie floater.
Here at home, I’m sure there was a time or two when you got down from the car and let your driver circle the block to look for parking space until on his fifth round, you were ready to get back to the car and leave the area, thank God!
In Singapore, the traffic is light and well-managed for a much-developed, modern city because, according to our tour guide, taxes on cars are high while public transportation service is cool, clean and perfect. Besides, less cars means less parking problems.
