Mobility in the capital city and elsewhere in the country is at stake. Every new day, the traffic congestion is getting from bad to worse and thus compelling enormous frustration among the residents and visitors. Hope against hope, people are just wondering if or when the situation would ever improve.
No doubt efforts are made through construction of flyovers or bypass or even new roads to ease the traffic congestion. However, the visible menace seems to be getting thicker, longer and more complex. While it is greatly impacting the normal flow of life, it is also affecting national productivity and growth in all sectors.
A general understanding of the situation is that there is a tremendous gap between the volume of vehicles on the road and the available road-space. Mathematically this is absolutely true. However, the greater truth is that there was no proper planning of the city and that there was clear dearth of forecast while drawing the blueprint of the plan earlier. We are now paying for such lacks.
Traffic congestion is nothing specific to our country. It is there in most of the growing cities in the world. In fact, several cities across the world are experiencing the wrath of vehicular congestion. The situation is worse in the developing world and where there is lack of public transportation facilities. A few months earlier, being caught in such congestion the Indonesian President had to abandon his official motorcade and walk for two miles to reach a public ceremony.
Traffic congestion is such a menace that it cannot be solved outright. Nevertheless, it can be eased. Taking into consideration the socio economic growth and the population growth as well as migration into cities, the number of vehicles would definitely increase as the mobility demands keep on growing. This is a dire fact of economics and cannot be denied. What is needed is adaptation to the new situation through redefining the infrastructure and bringing improvement to traffic management.
While redefining infrastructure may be long term solutions and would involve heavy cost, proper traffic management is what is needed immediately to bring some relief to the scenario. In this city, we have been witnessing temporary implementation of trial and error methods in traffic management. These may solve the problem at one spot but they create chain problems at other points.
Not far away, the city of Kolkata was once known for sporadic traffic jams. However, the situation has much improved there by implementing simple rules like one way traffic flow during certain busy hours and strict maintenance of electronic signals. Notorious traffic congestion in Mumbai, financial capital of India, has also eased a lot following construction of short overpasses at some key junctions.
Traffic congestion is not only creating frustration among the commuters but is also having a direct impact on health and environment as well. While health impacts are growing with increasing horn-honking, diabetes, blood pressure and orthopaedic complications, clouds are getting darker during day time due to relentless gas exhausts from stagnant vehicles. Perhaps things would improve when the mono-rail or MRT projects and other new concepts are implemented. For the moment, we have to impatiently wait to see the silver lining behind the dark clouds.
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