“Let’s park right here”

As if we don’t have enough stress in Ulaanbaatar, the city has a serious lack of parking space. After we suffer through a traffic jam during our short, precious lunch hours to get to get that doctor’s checkup, our final challenge would be finding a free parking spot, wherever that may that be. In the center of the city, there are designated parking spots and also, there are off road locations that often pose a bit of danger of damage to the cars that were forcefully made to use these parking spots.

After seeing that all these slots are taken by other cars we carefully cruise around, all the while listening to a series of annoying car horns from other frustrated drivers who are also looking for parking spots, we suddenly have had enough of it and decide to park “right there.” Although the picked spot looks nothing like a traditional parking space as we know, we park right there because anyone else who is in a desperate time-tight situation would do it and also because it would only be, “a minute. This is how a person in Ulaanbaatar parks his or her car during a busy day. Sometimes they park them right on the road to come back and see their license plates removed by traffic police, or worse, their cars towed.

The biggest reason we have extraordinary traffic jams and no parking space today is that Russian and Mongolian engineers, while designing Ulaanbaatar, miscalculated the growth of vehicle usage. Even if they did calculate it somewhat right, they would have gotten it wrong as Communism in Mongolia fell and the free market system emerged. This caused the vehicle population in Mongolia to increase at an alarming rate.

So the question comes down to: How do we deal with this today? It is a huge city planning issue and something must be done. The Ulaanbaatar City Council began to take serious actions in 2010 with the passing of a resolution that orders actions aimed exactly at this problem.

Its objective is to build numerous pay-to-park lots and garages around the city. Currently, 11 parking lots, located around administration buildings, hospitals and large business complexes, are being built and some of them are already in operation. Initially they were supposed to have a fee of 200 MNT an hour, but it was then realized this is not enough to keep the parking lots’ maintenance, so it was increased to between 500 – 1000 MNT.

Due to lack of available land in the city, the resolution also includes actions to remove private garages in the city and to replace them with new garages or parking lots under one management that provide more efficient service.

As the newly created Mongolian democracy struggled to stabilize its economy, along with the increased vehicle imports, private garages were also increasing. These private garages are basically a large cargo container, and some of them are built of bricks and crudely coated with cement, most of them located near old apartment neighborhoods.

The Initial actions the city has taken is the removal of some illegal private garages, but currently they are having some trouble removing the garages that are legally placed, and the owners have set prices on them ranging from 5 million to 10 million MNT. The city plans to build multi-storey car parks to replace these old illegal-parking garages.

In more developed nations there are many car parking systems Ulaanbaatar can take advantage of. Self-serving car parking is very popular, as it is automated and very requires a low maintenance cost. In urban areas, there are parking meters, which are also automated and are a very simple but efficient way to tax drivers for their parking spaces.

Although may be a bit costly for Ulaanbaatar, multi-storey car parks are probably the best solution as they take up least amount of area for the maximum amount of car parking space, which is exactly what we need.

As of right now, the frustration drags on, and the traffic police are not helping by harassing drivers for parking in the wrong place. There are locations where dozens of cars are parked on partially broken sidewalk, getting in the way of pedestrians. Although drivers cannot park their cars unless a sign states it is allowed, these parking spaces have become “legal” overtime because of its extreme necessity. On the other hand, a car parked on the road right beside cars parked on the pavement will be punished severely for causing traffic jams and annoying other drivers.

The traffic police, who are a part of the city administration, are working under certain unwritten rules. If their rules can be flexible, why can’t they be flexible on punishments and fines? The people in Ulaanbaatar that park their cars in the “wrong” places not done anything wrong. They are just trying to do their business on time, contributing to the city’s economy, and more importantly, to Mongolia’s economy. They are humbly paying their taxes and are all waiting for the city to use their tax money to do something about Ulaanbaatar’s parking nightmare.

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