Whenever you are driving to a crowded destination or a particularly popular shopping center in Kathmandu, one of your first concerns is whether the place has parking. If space isn’t available, you end up parking by the road—only to later find that traffic police has ‘locked’ your vehicle. Nor are many of the available pay-parking spaces well managed.

But a solution may be at hand. China’s Lutaida Company is coordinating with We Build, a Nepali construction-based company, to bring to you ‘Park Easy’. This is a vertical, rotating parking system in which the space normally taken up by two cars can accommodate around 12-20 cars. 

When a vehicle enters the system on the ground floor, it is immediately assigned a particular height for parking. The vehicle is then lifted up to that spot through by rotatory motion. And, when you have to take out your car, it is just a matter of flipping a switch again. The machine rotates and brings the car to the ground level. 

We Build Construction Service, Kathmandu is the sole authorized dealer for Park Easy in Nepal. Before Nepal, Park Easy has been installed in countries like China, Thailand, Singapore, Poland, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

The system is durable, too. The system’s service life is 50 years, according to Sukirti Sharma, Managing Director, who has played an instrumental role in bringing Park Easy to Nepal. It is the most space-efficient parking system, she claims, as a system can be set up in just 1.5-2 annas of land.

The other exciting feature of the system is that it can be easily dismantled and reinstalled somewhere else. And the installation happens instantaneously as well.

Sharma informs that Kathmandu would already have had three or four such installed systems where it not for the pandemic.

But how did the idea come to her? The civil engineer says she wanted to do something innovative in Nepal and started looking for inspiration abroad. It was then that she discovered Park Easy. “I think an innovative system like this can greatly reduce Kathmandu valley’s worsening congestion and parking problems,” she says.

Thus, in the first phase, We Build is targeting the Kathmandu Metropolitan City. Sharma claims that compared to what we normally pay for parking in Kathmandu, it will be 50-75 percent cheaper to park at the company’s installation.

The enterprising engineer is confident about her business model. As the initial investment can be recouped in 3-4 years, “it’s all profit for the rest of the system’s 50-year-life.”