Dubai: Thousands of special parking permits have been issued as the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) fully implements the paid parking system in Tecom-developed areas of Dubai Internet City, Media City and Knowledge Village.
The new parking management system introduced in January this year, involves two types of parking, the on-street paid parking, which is availed of by payment through meters or mParking and off-street reserved parking.
The reserved parking, which was fully operational from April 13, is available only for firms based in the area and special parking permits are issued based on the office space rented by each firm. The bigger the office space of a firm, the higher number of parking permits it can avail of.
“We have issued thousands of cards already and the parking management system is fully operational now. Anyone parking their vehicles in the big parking lots without permits will be fined,” said Adel Al Marzouqi, Director of Parking at RTA’s Traffic and Roads Agency.
Parking permits S1, S2 and S3 issued for Tecom-based customers are only valid for the three business parks and the regular permits A and B are not applicable in these areas.
Though the paid parking system was intended to ease parking congestions however, with increasing demand, more parking spaces are being created.
“Signs of paid parking zones have been put up across all three business parks and all available locations are being cordoned off to build more spaces, with as many as 500 more spaces being added,” Al Marzouqi said.
Interestingly, free parking spaces are still available in the area in multi-storey car parking buildings and basements of several buildings.
“There are hundreds of parking spaces in RTA’s car parking buildings which people can avail of. Apart from the first two floors, parking is free on the rest of the floors and people should make use of this,” Al Marzouqi said.
Parking is also available in the basements of several buildings, which will also be controlled in the next phase of the parking management system.
Encouraging people to use public transport, RTA has introduced several new and direct routes from the area, including 08, 83, 84, 85, 88, X28, F31.
“These routes cover Discovery Gardens, Ghubaiba station, Deira, Satwa station,and Al Quoz in addition to introducing and increasing internal transit routes running from the Metro stations adjacent to Tecom within the zone. The RTA is also working on increasing the number of air-conditioned bus stops,” said Maitha Bin Udai, CEO of RTA Traffic and Roads Agency.
