Times of India dated 17 January 2016
One of the most dramatic changes that have taken
place in Vizag is the numbers of vehicles that are used on our streets. Not
only have the numbers increased but also the different types and makes of
vehicles. When today’s old timers were in college very few households had bikes
or cars. The four-wheelers we would see on the streets were the ugly Ambassador,
the plain looking Fiat Premier Padmini and an occasional Mahindra Jeep all
which started manufacture in the 1940’s and slowly made its way all over our
country. Two-wheelers on the streets were the Vespa, Lambretta, Bullet, Jawa and
Rajdoot. In the 1970s you could sit opposite where the RTC Bus Stand is now and
would see perhaps 20 private vehicles in an hour of street gazing.
Chaos on our
roads
Then in the late 1990s the automotive industry
was released from the shackles of the license Raj and suddenly the action on
the street changed. By the year 2000 there were 12 large car manufacturing
companies in India and several bike manufacturers too. As manufacturing grew so
did family incomes and the financing options. Fuelled by aspirations everybody
started acquiring bikes and cars. Thousands of vehicles hit the road every day.
City planners were caught napping. Today our urban roads are crowded and chaotic.
In Vizag kids and youth zip in and out of traffic on their bikes, impatient car
owners become aggressive and Vizag’s 40,000 unruly auto rickshaws cause
constant chaos. In the midst of all this the hapless pedestrian suffers the most.
There is no place to walk and they have to compete with vehicular traffic on
the same road. No wonder that more and more pedestrians are getting killed each
year hit by motorbikes, cars and busses. This is only the beginning and with no
intervention planned things are only getting worse. Vizag is not only the
uplands and the beach road. We must look for city-wide solution. Can the
problem be solved? Let us identify some of the main problem areas.
Public transport
As our city population grows the earlier inner
city residential areas become commercialized and rents rise quickly. Citizens
migrate to the suburbs of the city where rents are lower. These folks have to
commute every weekday. If they do not get convenient public transport they will
use their own vehicles and this will clog the city roads. If we are to
decongest our roads we must provide a means to move large number of people from
their homes to their places of work or study and back as painlessly as possible.
Until we have a sophisticated metro rapid transit system we must depend on
improved bus service. Busses must become the kings of the road. Smaller,
nimbler, better vehicles appears to be the immediate solution.
Badly designed
roads
With multiple modes of wheeled transportation on
our roads it appears that we will never catch up with the demand for road
surface. So we have to do the best we can with the existing roads. Though they
are improving our road planners are still poor at good road engineering. It is
as if someone had opened a roads standards manual and decided to violate every
standard in it. In parts of Vizag it is
as if the roads were designed to torture the road user rather than help them.
The Spencer’s junction near Ravindra Bharati is an example of how to create chaos.
Road medians, camouflaged giant speed breakers and potholes are all designed by
a genius for mayhem and torture and there are plenty of examples of this all
over the city.
Auto rickshaws
While auto-rickshaws are a useful and economical
means of transportation, in the busier parts of the city they are the kings of
the concrete jungle and experts in guerrilla type traffic disruption. They stop
suddenly obstructing other auto rickshaws, and in the process all traffic
behind them, so that they may pick up passengers while preventing the guy behind
from doing so. Apparently the authorities cannot control them because they are supposedly
unionized and have political backing. In
Mumbai where political backing, unionism and gangsterism are rampant the police
have been highly successful in taming the auto rickshaw driver’s. Not only do
they drive in an orderly fashion, they go by meter and return even Rs. 2/-
change. The important thing is that they are scared of traffic cops and follow
instructions scrupulously. If they can do it in Mumbai can’t we do it Vizag?
Separating
vehicular from pedestrians
Look at any cityscape and you will find thousands
including the frail elderly and children mingling with traffic and scurrying
out of the way of vehicles. Throughout the world pedestrians are king of the
road and vehicles must respect their rights. Here pedestrians are fair game and
drivers look upon them as irritating pests on the road. The traffic cop also does
not consider it his duty to help pedestrians cross the road; his priority is
only to keep traffic moving, the quivering scared pedestrians must look after
themselves. If you need to cross a road regularly you may have to wear khaki, carry
a large red flag and a red STOP board. That will probably the only way you will
get across some streets safely. Are there any solutions?
Start with the
priorities
A) Double
our public transport capacity. As normal busses cannot negotiate our narrow
streets we must retire the big old busses and introduce mini busses in
congested parts of the city. They are nimbler and can negotiate slopes better.
B) Design roads
to separate people from traffic. Encroachments from footpaths must be
removed in all dense areas of the city like Dabagardens so that pedestrians can
get off the streets and get on to the pavements which should have railings.
Kerb heights should never be over 15 cm to encourage people to use them. The
current 30 and 40 cm high pavements only look good but don’t help. Bollards
must be inserted into all pavement access points to prevent bikes and cars from
climbing on to the footpaths. Every pedestrian crossing must have dedicated
traffic signal giving enough time to get a mass of walkers across especially
during the mornings and evenings. Give pedestrians an opportunity to walk along
tree shaded avenues and more people will walk freeing up space on the roads.
C) Get dangerous
drivers off the road, drivers of all
public vehicles must be counselled and forced to take a re-test every 3 years.
Dangerous drivers must be kept off the streets through a system of increasingly
strict driving tests. If our RTA cannot do it, these tests must be outsourced
to a reputed national company.
D) Get bad
vehicles off the road. Noisy, polluting
and unsafe public vehicles – both busses and auto rickshaws must be phased out,
this will put pressure on manufacturers to improve their vehicles.
E) Put some
muscle on the streets. Most
importantly traffic violations must be dealt with an iron fist. During the recent
CII Partnership Summit, Sunrise Andhra Pradesh meet, traffic police did a
splendid job of controlling traffic. This goes to show that they have the capacity
to do so when VIPs are in town. Now it is time for them to do so for the common
man.
This list is obviously not complete but this is a
good place to start.
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