With Mumbai running out of space, for motorists, finding a parking space is like hitting the jackpot. What makes the task daunting for them are the haphazardly parked autorickshaws and taxis, which often leads to ugly traffic jams. Keeping this in mind, the autorickshaw as well as the taxi unions have asked the Regional Transport Offices (RTO) in the city and suburbs to either revive the old parking stands allotted to auto and taxi drivers or provide them with new ones.

If the auto unions are to be believed, then in the last five years, the number of parking stands allotted to autos have come down to one-fourth of their original number, forcing drivers to park their vehicles randomly on roads.“Some five years ago, there were nearly 805 parking stands in the eastern and western suburbs that could accommodate 4,000-odd rickshaws. But today, their number has decreased to such an extentu00a0that they can only hold 1,000-odd autos,” said Shashank Rao of the Mumbai Auto Rickshawmen’s Union.