How much is ‘too much’ Traffic?
Will it be a perennial urban planning issue … or is help already underway?
Sharad’s Sunday Sojourns (week # 469 | 11th Apr 2021):
“Glamour is all about transcending this world and getting to an idealized, perfect place. And this is one reason that modes of transportation tend to be extremely glamorous. The less experience we have with them, the more glamorous they are. So, you can do a glamorized picture of a car, but you can’t do a glamorized picture of traffic.” … Virginia Postrel.
While ‘Far from the madding crowd’ is an apt hallucination for a perfect time-off from one’s everyday busy schedule, reality is often blemished with not-so-glamourous upshots! If you have realised the traffic in the cities of Mumbai, Beijing or New York City, you may comprehend what I am insinuating to.
Even though you haven’t, probably you are not a queerer to an ever-increasing number of climate fortification and sustainability protagonists, painting a grim picture of urban debauchery on a regular basis, with reference to a superset, that includes extraordinary energy consumption, as well as biblical proportions of emission, which unfortunately often correlated with too much traffic! Well, how much is too much?
We all remember 2018, when the focus on preserving the ‘tranquility of the roads’ in Norway caught the global attention. Just as environmentally amenable as the Scandinavian nations are, this was not a surprise. In fact, several EU nations have laid out stringent rules to avoid the congestion during working hours, as well as ways to evade the necessity to a great deal.
Saying that, the problem often lies in the scale of vision. For instance, clear cut guidelines could not be formulated with a rational evacuation protocol for the unaware committers, meaning auto-manufacturers, users of fossil fuel products, as well as industries still harbouring petrochemicals. Now, imagine their plight, with respect to centralised judgements.
Some social scientists are even pointing towards diverse perspectives. For instance, one can’t take away the privilege of those, who love to possess and drive automobiles. This is quite logical, since alternative fuel (read green) technology are under a perpetual research focus and companies like Tesla, with their electricity drives prototypes, have proved beyond doubt regarding its credibility and authenticity (subject to long-term scrutiny, of course!).
Democratic perceptions, depressions, state-driven authoritative intrusion onto public well-being, all have been debated and deliberated. While people won’t mind roaming on the boulevards of Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, or say Los Angeles and New York City, with little ease and probably safety measures, it will not undo the horrors, or enforce a single-handed, and swift justification of liberation from the urban transportation jargons, jitteriness and fables. Take a note of that!
It is not an easy task, to speculate decisions, purely based on ecological implications. Economics comes into play in a robust manner. Certainly, the amount of work needed to minimise traffic in New Delhi, Mumbai or Beijing would be way more compared to Bern, Oslo, or Berlin, one must note. Structural engineering and urban transport planning could come handy, as would innovative urban restructuring planning.
In this regard, China and even South Korea have shown great promise of late. Population will increase, or there will always be clusters segregated or concentrated in certain global hotspots. You can’t evade that, considering opportunities and facilities. But the million-dollar question is, how the limit of excess transport population (or traffic) is defined, take stock, contemplated, and rationed?
Oslo opened the debate in late 2018. Who will close it anytime soon? Or is it impossible?
(Video source: YouTube)
