Costly parking buildings sit empty while streets stay jammed: Study

ERattling forenoon thousands of office-goers in Bengaluru’s Gandhinagar and foot route dress circle blocks go around for 20–30 minutes hunting for parking, even as the ₹80-crore Freedom Park Multi-Level Car Parking nearby stands mostly empty.In Delhi, the situation is no different. A 2025 Jamia Millia Islamia study found motorists in Delhi waste an average of 20 minutes daily searching for parking --- fuel, time and often temper lost before the workday even begins.This pattern repeats across cities in India: expensive multi-level car parking (MLCP) towers stand half-empty while nearby streets remain choked with vehicles.Over the past decade, India has invested hundreds of crores in MLCPs under the Smart Cities Mission, AMRUT and municipal budgets. Delhi’s Municipal Corporation (MCD), for example, operates nearly 30 MLCPs and has proposed nine more at a cost of ₹775 crore, adding over 4,400 spaces and raising total capacity by 40% to roughly 15,157 vehicles.Similarly, Ahmedabad, Bhopal and Chandigarh have built many such facilities, often costing ₹50– ₹100 crore each. Yet most of them remain highly underused. Occupancy in many Delhi facilities hovers at 30–40% , Bengaluru’s average sits around 30%, and similar low utilisation is reported in cities like Pune, Chennai, Ahmedabad and other cities. Meanwhile, free on-street parking continues to dominate, consuming about 14% of Delhi’s road space and over 40% in many other cities, according to a study by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE).This is India’s parking paradox — massive public investment in multi- level parking facilities undermined by the very streets they were meant to decongest.Supply without strategyShreya Gadepalli, lead author of the Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation’s 2024 Roadmap for Parking Reforms in Indian Cities, says the current approach is fundamentally flawed. “Both prongs are about supplying more parking. One is the government building multi-level car parks, and the other is forcing every new commercial and residential building to provide minimum parking through development control regulations,” she says. “ But the world has moved in the opposite direction. Many cities have replaced parking minimums with parking maximums, especially near public transport hubs. Instead of saying ‘you must build at least this much parking,’ they say ‘you cannot build more than this much parking.’”Her view echoes the work of Donald Shoup, the American urban planning economist whose influential theory argues that underpriced or free parking encourages excessive driving, congestion, and inefficient land use. When parking is treated as a free public good, demand becomes artificially high and cities end up oversupplying it. His solution — properly priced on-street parking and the removal of minimum parking mandates — has shaped policy in many cities around the world.Architect and urbanist Dikshu Kukreja says that minimum parking norms only lead to distortion rather than genuine demand satisfaction. “They force developers to build parking irrespective of actual demand, locking valuable land and capital into a use that may not always be justified,” he says. “At the same time, public MLCPs remain underutilised because on-street parking continues to be informally available, cheaper, and far more convenient.”The Jamia study, led by Abdul Ahad and Farhan Ahmad Kidwai, also found that proximity overwhelmingly governs behaviour: 90% of drivers, for example, said they would not walk more than 250 metres from their destination. This keeps demand very high for kerbside spots and drives cruising — the practice of circling blocks in search of a spot — and illegal parking. Twelve per cent of respondents admitted to double-parking or occupying non-designated areas, further constricting road capacity.Experts say the deeper issue is a systemic subsidy to car owners at the expense of public space, equity, and sustainability. According to the Shakti Foundation’s, building a single space in a public multi-level car park costs around ₹10 lakh(excluding land) — roughly the same as constructing an affordable housing unit. Yet free or severely underpriced on-street parking occupies vast road space while these expensive MLCPs remain heavily underutilisedThe research from Surat, part of the same Shakti Foundation study, comes up with a counter-intuitive finding. “We found that people are far more willing to pay than the city assumed,” says Gadepalli. “Currently, cars are charged only ₹10 per hour and two-wheelers ₹5 per hour. Yet nearly 90% of people surveyed said they would pay ₹20 per hour for cars and ₹10 for two-wheelers if they get hassle-free parking. Higher pricing in high-demand areas means that those willing to pay get a spot with certainty,” she adds.Not just a metro problemTarun Sharma, co-founder of Nāgrika, an independent research organisation focused on India’s smaller and mid-sized cities, says the parking problem is not limited to just metros. In Chandigarh’s Sector-17, MLCP occupancy, he points out, is about 22% ; in Bhopal’s MP Nagar , as low as 17% for four-wheelers.“You can’t think that just building supply will create demand,” Sharma says. Multi-level car parking cannot be done in isolation. You cannot just pick a spot and decide to build a facility there. The location has to be chosen carefully, and it has to cater to actual demand.”OP Agarwal, transport expert and principal author of the National Urban Transport Policy 2006, agrees. “These multi-level parking facilities have not been thought through. What is driving them is a pure civil engineering mindset that focuses only on construction,” he says. “On-street parking should be allowed only for short durations and made very expensive for long stays. A proper demand study must be done before constructing a multi-level parking facility. They are more likely to succeed in areas where people need to park for longer durations, such as office districts.”Safety and security concerns — poor lighting, absent or rude attendants, and waterlogging – also limit usage of MLCPs. In Bhopal, for example, traders avoid several MLCPs due to fears of theft. In Pune, the PMC-run multi-level parking lot in Narayan Peth has become a stark example of how poorly managed facilities can be misused. Last year, the police raided the premises and busted an illegal gambling den operating inside the parking area, arresting 33 people. Cash, mobile phones, and gambling material worth nearly ₹5 lakh were seized. The same facility has repeatedly been used as a dumping ground for abandoned and unknown vehicles, raising serious concerns about security, oversight and maintenance.“The experience of the multi-level parking space matters a great deal,” says Sharma. “Creating retail on the ground floor can activate these facilities and make them more inviting and safer.”From an urban planning perspective, the failure of multi-level parking facilities reflects a deeper flaw in how Indian cities are planned. “These multi-storey parking structures show a pervasive lack of planning and a dismal vision of the future,” says Jagan Shah, urban expert and former Director of the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA). “They are ugly, poorly located, and fail to reduce on-street parking, their intended purpose. Instead of enabling demand-side management, improved mobility and protection of public space, they undermine quality of urban life. Yet such projects continue even as we invest billions in rail and bus systems.”The road aheadIn cities like London, Amsterdam, and Zurich, and across parts of Germany, the United States, and South America, governments now limit how much parking can be built, particularly near public transport. Free on-street parking has been largely done away with, and street parking is deliberately priced much higher than off-street alternatives.Paris has gone a step further. Since the pandemic, the city has removed tens of thousands of on-street parking spaces, converting them into protected cycle lanes, wider footpaths, and green spaces. “Whether it’s Paris or Budapest, they’ve created an urban mobility fund. All the money raised from the expensive on-street parking goes into that fund and is used to increase the number of buses,” says Gadepalli.Some cities in India are now beginning to take corrective measures. Bhubaneswar, for example, has banned on-street parking near its major MLCPs and is aggressively deploying towing fleets to enforce the rule. Bengaluru’s Parking Policy 2.0 aims to remove or significantly raise prices for on-street parking in high-density zones with underused multi-level facilities.Coimbatore is fixing the maintenance problem. Its RS Puram MLCP, commissioned in 2022 at a cost of over ₹40 crore with a capacity of 380 cars, remained non-operational for nearly three years due to repeated failures of its hydraulic lifts. After major repairs, two floors were made partially operational in December 2025. “There were engineering and maintenance issues that have now been rectified. We have asked the police to strictly enforce fines against illegal on-street parking in the busy commercial area,” says municipal commissioner M Sivaguru Prabakaran. Occupancy, he says, has since rose to about 70% over the last four months.The Shakti study recommends unbundling parking from real estate and shifting from minimums to maximums near transit hubs and corridors. “These shifts are both practical and necessary,” says Kukreja. “Moving to calibrated maximums allows developments to respond to actual mobility patterns rather than outdated assumptions of universal car ownership. Unbundling introduces cost transparency as buyers and tenants are no longer forced to pay for parking they may not need, making housing more equitable and potentially cheaper. For planners, this flexibility means prioritising people and open spaces over the mechanical accommodation of vehicles,” he adds.Integrating multi-level parking facilities with Metro stations, he says, can make parking part of a seamless journey rather than a detour.