As the month of fasting draws to a close we witness enhanced activities in our markets. This Ramazan also, as it enters its last week, the movement of traffic and the footfall in the markets have started picking up. Fortunately, partial opening up of the Jehangir Chowk-Rambagh flyover, and the opening up of the TRC grade separator has eased up the movement of traffic to some extent. But that is just a marginal relief, because finally when all the vehicles pour into the major markets of the city we face a huge problem of where to get these many vehicles parked. As the market activities pick up this problem will peak. In this situation it is a challenging task for the concerned departments, especially the traffic police department, to ensure that there is no jamming of the major streets and roads, and also there are ample parking spaces in and around the city centre. To this end we need to have more human resource deployed at the places where the probability of wrong parking, and hence traffic blocks, is more. Now it is understood that there are restraints of space, and no matter what the traffic department does, it cannot create any extra space around the main markets.
Whatever is available, we have to be content with that. But these spaces can be used efficiently by keeping extra men on duty, so that they ensure the vehicles are parked in a proper manner. Normally we see that the spacing between the vehicles is such that it disallows more vehicles to be parked, which otherwise could be accommodated. Another way of helping the situation is to create some temporary spaces in the parking lots that are under construction. We have some major car parkings in the city centre where work is going on. By some efficient panning some space can be created in those parking lots that can be temporarily thrown open for these few days. What can also help is to encourage people to park their vehicles across the Jhelum in the areas of Lal Mandi and Rajbagh, and walk down to Lal Chowk area using foot bridges. If that is done, and some extra spaces are created on that side of the Jhelum, it can ease the pressure of traffic to a good extent on the main markets in and around Lal Chowk.