PMC Is Demolishing JM Road's Parking Building the Same Year It Starts Charging to Park There

PMC is tearing down a parking building on JM Road the same year it starts charging you to park on JM Road.

Sit with that for a second, because it's not a coincidence of timing so much as two separate failures meeting in the same postal code. The multi-level parking structure on JM Road has sat largely unused for years — long enough that its eventual fate stopped being a live question and became a running local joke. Now the Pune Municipal Corporation has actually started demolishing it, a process expected to take around three weeks. What replaces it is, as of right now, uncertain. There's no confirmed new structure, no confirmed timeline, just a cleared site and a civic body that's expected this question again.

Meanwhile, paid parking is coming back to the same street

In a separate but perfectly timed move, PMC has resolved to bring back paid, on-street parking on a trial basis across six major roads: Laxmi Road, Jangli Maharaj Road, FC Road, Viman Nagar, Balewadi High Street, and Bibvewadi. The trial rates are modest on paper — ₹4 an hour for two-wheelers, ₹20 an hour for four-wheelers — but more than 45 other roads across the city are simultaneously being marked as strict no-parking zones, which pushes more of the parking that does happen onto the roads still charging for it.

So if you drive to FC Road or JM Road from here on, you're paying by the hour on the street, while the one structure built specifically to take cars off that street is being hauled away in pieces a few hundred metres down the road.

This stretch has never had slack to begin with

FC Road and JM Road aren't generic commercial streets — they're the spine of Pune's biggest single concentration of colleges and coaching institutes, Fergusson College and Symbiosis among them, layered on top of a dense retail strip that was never built for the volume of private vehicles it now carries daily. Every student, every young professional heading to a coaching class or a café meeting, has historically solved "where do I park" by circling the block once, then twice, then settling for whatever gap opens up on a side lane. That's the exact behaviour multi-level parking structures exist to absorb — and it's precisely the behaviour this one is about to stop absorbing, permanently, the moment demolition finishes.

What doesn't need PMC's sign-off

Nobody reading this controls when the replacement parking structure gets approved, funded, or built — that timeline runs through PMC's own budget cycle, not anyone's daily commute. What is already within anyone's control, starting today, is whether that commute needs its own dedicated parking spot at all.

A car with three people in it still only needs the one spot it would have needed with one person in it — at the new hourly rate, split three ways instead of paid in full by a single driver circling for the last open stretch of curb. For a corridor that just lost its parking building and gained a parking bill in the same news cycle, that's not a minor convenience. It's the one lever actually available before the next multi-level structure, if there is one, finally gets built.