‘Over 3,000 abandoned vehicles removed from Amman streets within campaign’

AMMAN — More than 3,000 abandoned vehicles have been removed from Amman’s streets in an ongoing effort to improve the appearance of the capital, the Greater Amman Municipality (GAM) said Tuesday.

Since a campaign was launched in 2011, GAM has removed 3,501 abandoned vehicles off Amman’s streets after the increasing number of the rusting vehicles had become health hazards, said Mutaz Zaghlawan, head of the technical control office at GAM’s construction monitoring department.

“Since the campaign was launched, 80 per cent of the abandoned cars have been removed from Amman’s streets. The campaign aims at addressing health and environment hotspots in Amman,” Zaghlawan told The Jordan Times.

In the clean-up campaign, implemented in cooperation with the Central Traffic Department, GAM teams locate abandoned vehicles and notify their owners that they need to remove them. 

They mark vehicles with stickers informing their owners to remove them within a 14-day period before they are towed away.

If the owners do not comply and remove their cars from the street, the abandoned vehicles are towed to a six-dunum impound lot near the Ring Road, according to GAM.

People can retrieve their impounded vehicles after paying the fees for transport as well as fees for each day their car was impounded, depending on the size of the vehicle, Zaghlawan noted.

“Since the start of the campaign, 281 vehicles have been removed by their owners while 65 impounded vehicles have been retrieved by their owners,” he said.

People often abandon their cars because they are wrecked after a road accident, when their licence has expired or if they become too old to function, according to GAM, which created a directorate in 2012 tasked with ridding the capital’s streets of rusting vehicles.

Municipality teams conduct twice-weekly inspection rounds or following reports from residents, according to GAM, which urged the public to call on 06/5687112 or 0798166816 to report sighting any abandoned car.