The delegate for the Environment and Mobility, Borja Carabante, has presented this Monday the balance of the Parking Inspection Plan for Residents, launched three years ago and which will conclude in May, with a total of 247 controls of the 271 municipal subways that They exist for residents.
“Six out of every ten spaces in these car parks were used irregularly,” reported the person in charge of the branch from the municipal car park located at 55 Ofelia Nieto street, in the Moncloa-Aravaca district.
To date, Madrid City Council has reviewed 90.5% of the 97,013 spaces for residents in municipal car parks, which means 87,844 spaces inspected and 67,652 verified, of which 40,885 are illegal (60.4%).
Of the latter, 59% (24,123 places) have already been regularized or are likely to be regularized, while the remaining 41% (16,762 places) have lost or will lose their reservations, since their holders used them fraudulently, explained the Consistory it’s a statement.
Specifically, they were used for lucrative uses such as renting, a prohibited practice, or their owners were no longer registered within the area of ??influence of the PAR (Resident Parking Space), generally about 400 meters from the car park. In this way, these places have been or will be awarded to residents who, like Ofelia Nieto, have been on the waiting list for years.
To date, 7,406 places have been regularized, but requests for assignment have multiplied exponentially for fear that the City Council would initiate a rescue procedure. These requests, between 2,500 and 3,000 per year, touched 8,000 in 2021.
For the Environment delegate, a “success” of the inspection campaign, since thanks to it there has been a “call effect” of the people of Madrid to regularize the situation of the squares. As an example, the case of the Ofelia Nieto car park, which has 165 spaces for residents and where 33% of improper uses (54 spaces) were registered: 25 were regularizable and 29 were not.
In this case, 19 users voluntarily requested the assignment so as not to lose the money they contributed, a process that has already been formalized. Thanks to the campaign, the 12 people who were on the waiting list in this subway have already received a place offer and, for the remaining seven places, the holders have been informed that they can provide an assignee, whose only requirement is to be registered in the municipality of Madrid, has indicated the City Council.
The City Council began the Parking Inspection Plan for Residents in February 2020 due to two variables such as the high demand for parking spaces by residents -a waiting list that exceeded 10,000 applications at the time and that had not been completed for seven years that any alteration occurs- and the detection of improper uses in different car parks.
Until then, the municipal Administration only carried out occasional visits to these facilities, but after evidencing the signs of irregularities, the implementation of a series of actions was justified to regularize and organize the situation in which the parking spaces for residents were.
The plan was launched with the double objective of regularizing the cases of people who have a legitimate right to the space and rescuing those that registered irregular uses that cannot be regularized in order to transfer them to people on the waiting list.
During all this time, the City Council has made an inspector available to residents in each of the car parks to guide them and help them with regularization. Once this extraordinary plan is completed, the Corporation will continue to carry out inspections in the parking lots.
The Madrid City Council set up a body of municipal parking inspectors for residents with the aim of creating an interlocutor at the service of residents. During all this time the inspectors have served as a channel of information with the residents on uses that can be regulated or not, how to regularize and any other matter related to municipal parking.
On occasions they have mediated in neighborhood disputes between residents, have provided support to administrators for debt collection and have provided personalized attention to people with reduced mobility who requested a parking space.
