ASHAIMAN TO GET NEW LORRY PARK (PAGE 18)

The Ashaiman Municipality is to have a new lorry park to end the frequent confrontation that ensues between the police and commercial drivers in the municipality.
This is the outcome of discussions between the Municipal Assembly and various transport associations operating in the municipality.
The Ashaiman Municipal Chief Executive, Mr Albert Boakye Okyere, confirmed this to the Daily Graphic and said the new lorry park would be located near the over-pass on the Tema-Accra Motorway, where there was a vast land to develop into a spacious lorry park.
He said the new lorry park would be occupied by long distance vehicles so as to ease movement to and from Ashaiman.
According to Mr Okyere, the assembly was young and would need funds for the project, which it has already started, and that the Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Environment was playing an intermediary role to help the municipality to access funding for the project and that the site had already been cleared and levelled.
He said as an interim measure, the ongoing Urban Environmental Project in the municipality had targeted to provide some lay-bys to serve as parking lots for vehicles and taxis working in the municipality.
Mr Okyere said the Municipal Assembly had made the development of lorry parks and markets its priority.
Commercial drivers who operate from the Ashaiman lorry park claim that the park is choked and therefore cannot contain vehicles which need to park there for loading.
Some of the vehicles are compelled to park outside the lorry park and enter it one after the other as and when others drive out.
This results in the narrowing of the road into a single lane to the discomfort of other road users.
It was this congestion and inconvenience the drivers had been suffering that led to misunderstandings between the police and the drivers on many occasions, leading to the arrest of some commercial drivers.
The drivers accuse the police of exploiting the situation to their advantage and allegedly extorting monies ranging from GH¢50 from drivers who were not prepared to go to court when they violated any regulations.
It was the attempt to counter this arbitrary action of the police which resulted in the drivers clashing with the police, creating the mayhem that claimed two lives, with many others sustaining various degrees of injury.
The executives of various transport unions in Ashaiman moved in to save the situation, and they are now discussing the possibilities of getting an alternative loading area to ease the congestion.
They claim that the drivers wait outside to be issued with tickets before they enter the lorry park because of lack of space.
Briefing the Daily Graphic on the issue at Ashaiman, the first trustee of the Ashaiman branch of the Ghana Private Road Transport Union, Mr Augustine Kyeremeh, said the transport unions, made up of the GPRTU, Co-operative and PROTOA, sent a delegation to the Ashaiman Municipal Assembly to discuss the possibility of providing them with another lorry park.
He said they were given the assurance that the Assembly would provide the drivers with a more spacious lorry park but had to continue with the existing arrangement while the area was prepared for them.
Mr Kyeremeh said presently all vehicles operating from Ashaiman to the regions used that same lorry park.
He, therefore, appealed to the municipal authorities to expedite action on the development of the more spacious lorry park to end all confrontations between them and the police.
Mr Kyeremeh said the police would be fair to them, if they ensured that all drivers were treated equally. According to him, some other groups who had not registered with any of the unions were rather given preferential treatment by way of allowing them to create their own parking areas, while the registered ones were arrested for wrongful parking.
When the reporter visited the lorry park, she noted that food vendors and other petty traders had occupied some of the spaces where drivers could have parked their vehicles.
Some people the Daily Graphic spoke to were of the view that if the traders were evicted from the station, there would some space for the drivers to park their vehicles and load.