GEORGE TOWN: Many season pass holders at car parks here have terminated their membership due to the prolonged pandemic.
With many office workers now working from home, most of the parking lots at the car parks are devoid of vehicles.
Along Chulia Street, King Street and Beach Street, ample parking spaces could be seen during the weekday peak hours despite them being prime locations for business centres, banks and companies.
At the Penang Island City Council (MBPP) multi-storey car park in Beach Street, many workers in the area who subscribed to season parking plans previously had cancelled their membership.
Its car park supervisor Abu Bakar Md Salim said some 22 people who previously subscribed to seasonal parking had abruptly ended their season parking plans.
“With so many offices urging their workers to work from home nowadays, many no longer need season parking services.
“At present, we only have fewer than 20 people with seasonal parking plans, with the majority from the management’s side or those who operate businesses within this building.
“Previously, before the last round of lockdown, we had over 40 people subscribing to the seasonal parking plans,” he said when met at the premises recently.
Abu Bakar said at present, the car park with over 200 parking bays was only occupied up to 17% at most on a daily average.
“Some who come in are using the autopay ticketing system, so there are roughly 30 vehicles here in and out on weekdays.
“Most of them now park outside at the MBPP parking lots along the road because there are many empty spaces there.
“In the past, this area was busy and many people used to park here because they were unable to find any empty lots outside.
“Now that many of the workers in the vicinity are working from home, they can easily find parking outside so they would not want to pay as much for parking here.”
Abu Bakar said according to present parking rates, they were charging RM1.50 per hour compared to the council parking lots outside that charge 40sen for half an hour and 80sen per hour.
Meanwhile, an outreach programme on standard operating procedure (SOP) conducted by the police over the weekend to prevent overcrowding found that there was no influx of people in Penang over the weekend.
The programme was carried out at Gurney Plaza, Miami Beach and Shamrock Beach in Batu Ferringhi.
Penang police chief Comm Datuk Mohd Shuhaily Mohd Zain said according to their traffic data over the weekend, it was found that the traffic across several areas in Penang dropped by 20%.
“We were expecting an influx of traffic based on predictions of the data we obtained for the weekend of Sept 13 but checks on hotspots on the following weekend found no overcrowding.
“From Sept 17 to 19, police checks across hotspots found sparse crowding and there was no crowding like what we expected.
“In fact, we witnessed a 28% reduction in traffic to Penang from Sept 16 to Sept 19,” he said during a press conference at the Penang police contingent headquarters recently.
Comm Mohd Shuhaily said while they did not have data to check whether these figures correlated to the impact of their outreach programme, they would continue checks from time to time to ensure factual accuracy.
