A joint venture between a Saudi and a German company has submitted the most attractive bid for a seven-year contract to automate and manage the city’s parking facilities, The Express Tribune has learnt.
Lahore Parking Company (LPC) officials said that they had received three bids for the contract: from Turkish company UCS: from Advanced Global Communication Networks, a Saudi company, in partnership with Green Park, a German company; and from the Mansha Brothers, in a joint venture with the Dubai-based Speed Park.
The bids, which had technical and financial components, were opened on August 30. The bid from Mansha Brothers and Speed Park was disqualified on technical grounds. The other two technical bids were okayed, after which the financial bids were opened.
The LPC officials said that of the remaining two bids, AGCN and Green Park had made the best offer. While UCS had offered to share just five per cent of the total profit from the parking operations with the LPC, AGCN and Green Park had offered a 45.4% profit share.
They said that the “mobilisation plan” for the automation of the city’s parking lots submitted by AGCN and Green Park was also superior. The UCS plan was “badly drafted and showed little effort”, they said. The AGCN-GP plan was “detailed and well-researched”.
The UCS plan did not include cameras at many of the city’s parking lots, while AGCN and GP were offering to install cameras at on-street as well as off-street parking sites, to deploy officials with hand-held devices to issues parking tickets at on-street sites, and to build automated barriers at entrances and exits to parking lots. The AGCN-GP plan also envisaged deploying more men to manage parking sites and traffic flow. They had identified two potential sites to build data centres to control and monitor parking lots, they added.
The LPC, an autonomous, for-profit company, is to give 75 per cent of its profits to the city government. The company has already been transferred control of all the parking sites of the city, 354 in total, including 179 active sites. From these sites, the LPC has been generating around Rs17 million per month.
LPC Media Relations Officer Fasiuddin said that the contract would be awarded in about four weeks. He refused to share the details of the financial bids, saying they could not be disclosed until a final decision on the contract was made.
He said that the company winning the contract would be given 66 parking sites to automate in six months, which would constitute the first phase of the project. In the next 12 months, the company would have to automate all the other parking sites in the city. He said that the first six months would be tough, both for the LPC and the contractor, since they would have to begin from scratch.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 4th, 2013.