The Capital Development Authority is working on a time-based electronic parking system at seven locations in Islamabad, with the duration of vehicles’ stay to be recorded digitally and parking charges monitored through an electronic dashboard. CDA officials told the Senate Standing Committee on Interior that work on the project was already underway, giving lawmakers an update on the digitization effort during a recent committee session.
Under the proposed system, the time a vehicle remains in a designated parking area will be tracked on a dashboard, allowing the authority to monitor both parking duration and applicable charges electronically. Senator Naseema Ehsan noted that a traffic management system similar to one introduced in Karachi had also been started in Islamabad, while highlighting the difficulties faced by residents and visitors in finding parking spaces, given that people from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan and other provinces also live in or regularly visit the capital.
Director General Enforcement Anum Fatima told the committee that the Blue Area parking plaza, located in Islamabad’s central commercial district, had been completed and would help address parking problems in the area. She said parking fees were being collected according to the CDA’s approved layout plan, while cashless payments and QR codes were already being used for transactions at all parking facilities, pointing to an existing digital payment layer that the new time-based tracking system is expected to build upon.
Despite this progress, Senator Abid Sher Ali questioned the CDA’s parking arrangements, pointing out that parking fees were still being collected on roads despite the authority’s statement that the Blue Area parking plaza had been completed, describing the two positions as contradictory. He also proposed that new commercial plazas should not be granted a No Objection Certificate unless they provide adequate underground parking facilities, raising a related structural concern about how new construction in Islamabad accounts for parking capacity going forward as the CDA works to modernize its parking enforcement systems across the capital.
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