KenaSaman.com

KOTA KINABALU: City Hall’s plan to turn the abandoned land next to the Bank Negara building in the heart of town into a temporary street car park has been unsuccessful as the land is privately owned.

Mayor Datuk Abidin Madingkir said since the land does not belongs to the City Hall they are unable to use it despite having been left with no choice but to upkeep and maintain the area after it was abandoned by its owners several years ago.

He saidCity Hall previous attempts to convert the land as temporary car park, in order to create more car parks in town, was also met with obstacles due to legal tussles involved on the land at that time.

In efforts to reduce parking congestion, he said City Hall would be creating more on-street car parks by converting existing road dividers at strategic locations into parking lots.

“This will be implemented in stages depending on funds,” he said, adding that they were now in the midst of negotiations with the management of shopping complexes to provide incentives to promote long term parking at their multi-storey cark parks.

Abidin, however said that despite complaints of insufficient on street car parks, the car parks in most of the multi-storey car parks in the central business district areas (CBD) are not fully utilized or occupied.

Presently, there are about 10,890 car parks and out of these, 7,100 are multi-storey car parks and about 3,790 are on street car parks.

Based on a survey done by a consultant in 2008, the occupancy of the multi-storey car parks in the CBD was not more than 70 percent.

In other words, there are still car parks available and not being utilized in the multi-storey car parks.

Abidin said the problem could be attributed to the fact that many people who works in the CBD area had the tendency to park their cars at the on-street car parks for the whole day.

This therefore gives rise to the shortage of on-street car parks for the public who need to park for a short time.

He said there is a need to persuade the public who park their cars for long term or more than three hours in the CBD areas, to park their cars at the multi-storey car parks.

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