Parking woes continue in Dibrugarh town

A Correspondent

Dibrugarh, July 4: RKB Path, one of the busiest roads of the town, has shrunk in width because of poor parking arrangements by the authority concerned. With vehicles parked on both sides of the road, the space available for traffic has reduced drastically, thereby resulting in a lot of congestion. The road is not just important as it leads to the New Market area, but also because it has a couple of shopping malls, a linear arrangement of mobile phone stores, and many travel agencies located alongside it. As a result, it ends up serving as a parking lot for all kinds of customers, which causes inconvenience to the people using the road to travel to places like Amolapatty, Shantipara, Cole Road, Naliapool and Seujpur.

Although large shopping establishments, especially malls, are required to maintain their individual parking lots, not all such organizations have taken a serious note of it. While Junction Mall, one which houses popular centres like Galleria Cinemas and Sohum Shoppe, has provisions for underground parking, Vishal Mega Mart, another place which draws a lot of footfalls, is yet to throw open its parking space for the use of public. It is believed that the parking facility of the latter, when made available, could solve the problem to some degree, if not completely.

The blame for the frequent traffic snarls normally goes to the vehicle-owners who park their vehicles; but, on a second thought, the question springs up as to where would they do the parking otherwise. Quite strangely as well as ironically, the steep rise in the number of vehicles does not commensurate with good roads and adequate parking facilities. Like The Sentinel had reported earlier, the ever-growing town of Dibrugarh is in dire need of a multi-level parking facility; the sooner, the better. Otherwise, once the Bogibeel Bridge starts operating, and brings in a swarm of people from across the other bank of the Brahmaputra on a daily basis, the authorities will be at their wits end finding a way out of the trouble.