NEW DELHI: Charging of parking fee doesn’t violate building bylaws or the Master Plan, Delhi High Court has said, allowing Pacific Mall Tagore Garden to levy a fee for vehicles parked in its basement.
A bench of Justice Vibhu Bakhru and Justice Amit Mahajan pointed out that parking is one of the permitted activities in the basement and the areas earmarked for the said purpose in the mall.
“So long as the said areas are used for parking of vehicles, it would not be open for Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) to claim that the area has been misused for the reason that the owner is charging a fee for permitting parking in the said premises. There is no provision in the Building Byelaws which proscribe charging of fee or controls the terms on which buildings are used,” noted the bench, setting aside an MCD order directing Pacific Mall not to charge the vehicles parked inside.
The High Court is right. People should be made to pay a fee when parking in a mall’s basement. They should also do the same when parking on the road outside it. Otherwise, parking becomes unregulated and ends up creating chaos. As a policy, people should be discouraged from using private vehicles and encouraged to use public transport. But such steps can have a salutary fall-out only when public transport is easily available and efficient, and last-mile connectivity effective.TimesView
Giving the example of a house owner with spare parking space on stilt of the residential building, HC said the owner is clearly not barred from permitting a neighbour to park his vehicle in the said space on payment of agreed consideration.”So long as the stilt area is used for parking of vehicles (which is a permissible use), the Building ByeLaws would have no further application. The Building Byelaws are not relevant to the monetary arrangement between the house owner and his neighbour,” the court said.
The court rejected MCD’s justification that if the mall owners are permitted to charge parking fees from the visitors, they would park their vehicles on the roadside leading to traffic congestion,
