Sanayeh garden being used to park cars on Elections Day June 7th, 2009

Nowadays this issue is confronting Beirut citizens owing to two major developments. First, the enormous increase in numbers of cars in Lebanon, and second the lack of parking in every building. In 2008, a private company operating for Beirut municipality installed parking meters on Lebanon’s main roads. These parking meters operate from 8am to 5pm and charge 250L.L. for 15 minutes, 500L.L for 30 minutes, and so on. The maximum one can pay for is 2 hours, and if you fail to pay these fees, you will get a parking ticket of 10,000 L.L.

With the installation of these machines you can now park anywhere during the day to do your shopping and make other daily stops. However, if you are a resident in these neighborhoods and decide to take a day off and stay at home instead of going to work or university, you have to go every 2 hours to these parking meters and pay 2,000 L.L. which comes out to a total of around 9,000 L.L. Or you can just stay in bed, and let the policemen give you a ticket for 10.000 L.L.

These parking meters are a good solution for shopping areas or residency areas where every building has its own parking but not in areas where residents are already parking on streets. Beirut’s municipality decided to solve this problem by implementing parking lots under the Sanayeh garden which is one of the biggest gardens in Beirut, and other gardens like the Sioufi and St. Nicolas garden. The Sanayeh garden was founded in 1908 which means that the trees in it are over 100 years old. And even if the municipality is going to replant new trees, we need to have over 25 trees in order to get the same benefit as one old tree.

Is this really the best solution, to cut down trees to build parking lots when our country is on the edge of an ecological disaster? Maybe we should consider building more gardens and planting new trees. After all a small change by every person can lead to a huge change in all the country.

Published in the newspaper distributed with An-Nahar and Al-Akhbar on June 4th 2009