Reforms in Panaji's pay and park policy

Goa has the highest per-capita car ownership among all states of India.¹ The state's AMRUT plan indicates that the current public transport modal share in the city is just 2%. This means that 98% of Panaji's residents prefer other modes of transport, such as personal four- and two-wheelers.² Table 1 compares vehicle ownership in Panaji with two comparable cities, Panvel in Maharashtra and Karwar in Karnataka. All three have similar median incomes, a significant Konkani-speaking population and are roughly the same size. Yet, despite the socio-economic similarities, residents of Panaji have far more vehicles than residents of the other two cities.

Source: Census 2011. Houses deemed "vacant" by census officers were not surveyed.

Panaji's problem with cars

The city of Panaji is already well beyond its carrying capacity. Panaji was planned in 1774, and its streets were designed for a resident and floating population of around 15,000. The primary modes were walking and boats, with very few horse or bullock carts. Panaji now has a resident population of at least 40,000, with an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 additional people coming in daily.³ They come for jobs and for commercial, institutional and economic activities. Tourists, businesses and government departments in the capital support local grocery stores, restaurants and small businesses, and they bring a large volume of pedestrian and vehicular traffic into the narrow lanes of the core city. Accommodating these vehicles on the road and in parking is a pivotal challenge, resulting in congestion, longer travel times and worse air quality.

Table 2 shows how steadily vehicle numbers have grown. One of the fastest-growing segments is rental two-wheelers; the lack of parking and public transport in tourist areas may be pushing visitors towards them.

Source: Department of Transport, Government of Goa (2021). Granular data for Panaji was not available; an estimated 80% of vehicles registered at the Panaji RTO move around Panaji city.

The problem is made worse by the lack of on-site parking in most buildings in this historic city. Amendments to the building regulations⁴ now require limited on-site parking, but there has been negligible new construction within city limits in the last decade.

Congestion and parking policy in Panaji

Congestion has become a major issue for residents, and successive strategic, investment and development plans have prioritised it for a decade and a half. The 2005 development plan⁵ proposed reclaiming the Manshem wetlands for a business hub called Patto, with additional parking and bus connectivity for commuters. The State Government's "Imagine Panaji" master plan⁶ (2011) and the Charles Correa Foundation's "Decongestion Model for Panaji City Core"⁷ (2014) put congestion front and centre. More recently, Imagine Panaji Smart City Corporation paid UMTC ₹28 million to prepare a comprehensive mobility and parking master plan.⁸

None of these plans was fully implemented, but the CCF plan pushed the Corporation of the City of Panaji (CCP) to prepare estimates for pay parking. CCP estimated annual expenses at ₹360 million and parking revenue at a minimum of ₹450 million.⁹ In 2014 CCP released a tender for a contractor at a fee of ₹9 million per month. All the bids received were below one-third of the estimate.¹⁰ The tender was withdrawn and reissued in 2019, when a bid of ₹4.5 million from a private contractor was accepted.

Hurdles to enforcing parking policy

Until affordable cars arrived in the 1990s, no one assumed so many people would own private vehicles. Today every lane of the core city, including the corners, is permanently occupied by cars, leaving almost no space for anything else. Every other activity becomes an obstacle to vehicles, particularly private cars. Despite a District Magistrate notification enforcing no-parking at designated corners,¹¹ no action has been taken against offenders.

Enforcement of traffic rules has been relatively weak. The Panaji police traffic cell has just 59 officers for a jurisdiction of 193 sq km. As of November 2022, 650 police personnel handle at least 1.54 million vehicles across the state, a ratio of 2,300 vehicles to every officer.¹² Panaji is also a city of events and festivals: at the time of writing, traffic police were busy managing the International Film Festival of India, and city officials complained of too few staff to deal with violations.¹³

The city still has no count of the parking slots in its jurisdiction, and there is speculation that slots were undercounted in the estimates. Vehicle sample surveys by ICLEI and CCF suggest roughly five times as many cars enter the core city as there are parking slots in CCP's estimates. Double parking and parking in no-parking zones are common. If Panaji is serious about a progressive parking policy, the following recommendations are worth examining.

Solutions for parking reform

Transport and parking problems need to be understood as problems of accessibility, not mobility. Mobility is a derived demand: people travel because they need to reach destinations.¹⁴ This is particularly true in Indian cities, where case studies show that widening carriageways leads to more trips by private vehicle. The environmental and social costs of congestion must also be counted when planning in the public interest.¹⁵

Given Panaji's very limited carrying capacity, a progressive policy has to be comprehensive. Transport planning must be integrated into land-use plans, and transport plans must aim to reduce congestion rather than ease mobility.

Data collection

The first step for CCP is simple data collection; the city badly lacks urban information. The 2018 Parking Master Plan by UMTC, for example, did not enumerate existing parking slots.¹⁶ The last vehicle mode surveys for Panaji were done in 2013 for the CCF plan. Without recent data, it is impossible to plan transport accurately.

Congestion pricing

One way to tackle congestion is to charge people who choose private transport, since they generate more trips and more congestion. Singapore introduced congestion charges in 1975 through its Area Licensing Scheme, and London in 2003. On the day London's charge began, it added 300 buses to the central London network to strengthen the alternative. Vehicles pay £15 a day to enter the 21 sq km zone between 7 am and 6 pm on weekdays and 12 pm to 6 pm on weekends. Between 2002 and 2014 the zone saw 39% fewer private cars. The charge has risen from £5 to £15 since 2003.¹⁷

In theory, congestion pricing should be easy to implement at Panaji's six entry points, but it needs political will that has not yet materialised. Two principles from good practice matter:

• Gravitational attraction: price by land use and time, according to what draws people into Panaji. A flat fee of ₹20 is not working.
• Progressive use of revenue: the money collected should be a cess reinvested in non-motorised transport. Today it goes to contractors and is not reinvested by CCP.

Surge pricing for parking

Surge (dynamic) pricing sets parking fees by demand, which varies with land use and time of day: higher in peak hours, lower off-peak. This reflects land value, reduces congestion and discourages long-term parking. CCP currently charges ₹20 throughout the day, with no difference between peak and off-peak. The fee is low enough that drivers happily pay and park all day, so it does little to reduce congestion. Double parking is common on almost all primary and secondary roads. Demand is extremely high and capacity extremely limited, so traffic overflows. To decongest the city, the number of vehicles parked on the street must come down. Panaji could test surge pricing on specific streets as a pilot, to understand the challenges before scaling it to a ward or the whole city.

Municipalising traffic management

Soon after the 2022 US midterm elections, Philadelphia decided to replace some police officers with civilians for traffic enforcement.¹⁸ Activists in Washington DC have pushed for similar reforms modelled on Germany's Ordnungsamt, an unarmed force that keeps public order. Panaji already has a statutory route: under the CCP Act 2002, the city can draft bye-laws on "street traffic and the reduction of noise caused by such traffic."¹⁹ The Goa Motor Vehicles Act may need amending, but that should not be a major hurdle.

Final thoughts

With its complex networks of actors, politics and tourism aspirations, Panaji's transport problem is a "wicked problem"²⁰ that needs a radical response. Endless pilots and trial and error risk postponing action and eroding public support for long-term solutions. The city needs to act now: integrate transport into land use, and take the risky steps today, before it is too late.

Notes

1. Census of India, 2011.
2. CCP Goa, "AMRUT Service Level Improvement Plan for Urban Transport in Goa," Imagine Panaji Smart City Corporation, January 2016.
3. Census of India, 2011.
4. Goa Land Development and Building Construction Regulations (GLDBCR), Amendment of 2017.
5. "Outline Development Plan for Panaji 2011," North Goa Planning and Development Authority, 2005.
6. Mendizabal, Maria (2011), "Imagine Panjim," Goa State Infrastructure Development Corporation & LKS.
7. Correa, C., Parikh, R., D'Souza, R., Pereira, G. & Hameed, B. (2014), "Decongestion Model for Panaji City Core," Charles Correa Foundation.
8. "IPSCDL's consultant asked to 'complement' comprehensive mobility plan report," The Navhind Times, 14 July 2018.
9. Corporation of the City of Panaji (2013), "Approximations for Pay-Parking, Phase-I in Panaji City."
10. "CCP's pay-parking tender comes a cropper again," The Times of India, 17 September 2015.
11. Notification no. 23/6/2022/MAG/TIS/2408, dated 10 August 2022.
12. "Acute staff crunch hits Goa Traffic Police," oHeraldo, 6 November 2022.
13. Anonymous CCP employee, personal interview, November 2022.
14. Levine, J., Grengs, J. & Merlin, L.A. (2019), From Mobility to Accessibility, Cornell University Press.
15. US Federal Highway Administration (2008), "Congestion Pricing: A Primer: Overview."
16. UMTC, "Parking Master Plan for Panaji City," Imagine Panaji Smart City Development Corporation.
17. US Federal Highway Administration (2008), "Congestion Pricing: A Primer: Overview"; see also Transport for London, Congestion Charge.
18. Orso, A., "Philadelphia can replace some police officers with civilians, arbitration panel rules," The Philadelphia Inquirer, 15 November 2022.
19. Corporation of the City of Panaji Act, 2002.
20. Rittel, H.W.J. & Webber, M.M. (1973), "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning," Policy Sciences 4(2), 155–169.