City plans for temporary parking

HCM CITY — The municipal Transport Department has submitted to the People's Committee a draft plan to use 119 streets in the city as temporary parking spaces.

The draft was prepared after all streets had been cleaned up under a request from the Government and the National Transport Safety Committee.

The department said demand for parking space is huge in the nation's largest city, but underground or above-the-ground parking facilities are still on paper.

Downtown HCM City has a lot of office buildings, hotels and restaurants, but most of them have very small parking spaces, it noted.

According to statistics from the Construction Department, only 14 out of 79 downtown high-rise buildings have enough space for parking. Fifty-nine others have smaller spaces and six have no parking space at all.

Nowadays, it is very hard to find parking space for motorbikes, despite the price is very high, often VND10,000, three times higher than usual.

Residents of many apartments in the city are also suffering, especially those that were built several decades ago without any parking space.

Along with the old apartments built before 1975, many others constructed recently lack parking space as well.

In District 5, there are a whopping 247 apartments without parking lot.

Residents of such apartments have to arrange for their motorbikes to be guarded for payment of monthly fees. Such arrangements come with several inconveniences, including limited time periods during which the motorbike can be left or collected. — VNS