Pristina overwhelmed by cars, lack of parking lots

One of the capital's biggest problems is busy communication and lack of parking lots. Their absence is not only causing chaos in communications, but it is also preventing the free movement of pedestrians.

Municipal officials for years promise to ease this problem by building several underground parking lots, but this proposal is still not possible.

Parking cars in public spaces or sidewalks prevents the free movement of citizens. Some of the respondents told Kosovo Radio, that the number of such drivers in the capital is great, and this phenomenon has become very disturbing to them.

No comment, big absurd! They leave the cars across the street, where for days what happens next, you can't get through. That is a great difficulty. It's fair to park cars on the street, because it prevents pedestrian crossing”, a citizen said.

Milaim Feyzullahu, from the Kosovo Police Traffic Unit, told Radio Kosovo that every day they face cars parked on sidewalks, and that, according to him, primarily prevents pedestrians. He says the situation created is the result of insufficient parking lots in the capital.

We face illegal parking every day, patrol units should be taken any time to pull vehicles off sidewalks to clear the way for pedestrians, so that if the Pristina Community created space for public parking, the ground units would deal with other counters and not with illegal parking lots of”, Fyzullahu said.

The Pristina municipality for years had promised to solve this problem by building several underground parking lots at different locations in the city. However, this proposal still cannot be realised.

Pristina municipality spokesman Adonis Tahiri told Radio Kosovo that at the end of this year, it is expected to begin the underground parking project, which will be built at the Philological Faculty. According to Tahiri, this project is expected to be completed within 18 months.

The “we are in the first phase of the underground parking project, which will be built at the Philological Faculty in Pristina and by the end of this year all phases to be passed with public-owned partnership procedures so that we can start fixing underground parking, which will have two floors with a capacity of 500-900 private-cars, he said.

Tahiri, among other things, said the Pristina municipality would have two other categories of parking lots. One is neighborhood parking lot, where residents of the neighbourhood will take advantage of monthly tickets. As for neighborhoods that do not have parking lots, a kahesh will be made by the streets and the sidewalks of one direction could be expanded as parking lot.