[sustran] Subir Roy: When will we ever learn?

[eric.britton]

Subir Roy: When will we ever learn?

	

OFFBEAT

	

Subir Roy / Bangalore February 13, 2008

	
	
	

 


The name Gore Vidal takes up more than two-thirds of the space on the cover
of my old paperback collection of some of his essays. For good reason, as
the same cover has New Statesman, a considerable thunderer in those days,
describing Vidal as "America's finest essayist". In it is a little gem, his
1974 essay, "What Robert Moses Did to New York city", which educated Indians
worried about the urban blight afflicting their country can read with
benefit. 


 


Moses was parks commissioner for New York city for four decades up to the
early sixties. Says Vidal, "After the Second World War he (Moses) built more
than $2 billion worth of roads within the city. To do this he expropriated
thousands of buildings, not all of them slums, and evicted tens of thousands
of people who were left to fend for themselves. Moses's elevated highways
shadowed and blighted whole neighbourhoods." 


 


Vidal recounts that Moses was not satisfied even after having done this as
"he had yet another Dream: exodus from the city to the suburbs, but only by
car, for there were to be no buses or trains on his expressways - just more
and more highways for more and more cars, creating more and more traffic
jams, while the once thriving railroads that had served the city went
bankrupt." And as the "city became more desperate and congested," Moses's
answer was "build more roads." 


 


Thirty years on, Vidal's final comment remains startlingly relevant. Moses
was "a lover of the automobile: 'We live in a motorised civilisation.'
Energy crisis (the 1973 first oil shock has just come) unliveable cities,
pollution - none of these things has altered his proud dream." That dream is
now rapidly declining in Europe, has started doing so in parts of America
like California, but lives on in India. 


 


One of the most high-profile road projects in today's India, the Gurgaon
expressway to Delhi, has just fully opened to a fascinating scenario.
Several years late and finally built at a multiple of the original cost,
traffic on it from day one has exceeded the original estimate of optimum
levels. There are massive traffic jams at toll gates along the road as car
owners queue up to pay up and then zoom into Delhi in record time. 


 


Once glitches about the odd amounts of toll payable (getting the change
takes time) are straightened out and more motorists get pre-paid cards,
these jams will ease but in just a few years the expressway itself will in
all likelihood not be enough to carry all the cars, creating jams on it, not
just at the gates but along the way. What is perhaps most telling is that
there are too few crossovers. So people living on either side trying to do a
quick dash are running into accidents. 


 


Now let us take a quick look at what is happening in London. Mayor Ken
Livingstone wants a cycling transformation of the city. There are to be 12
cycling superhighways in and out of the heart of the city. A massive 400
million pounds is being devoted to promoting cycling. One of the elements is
to have a free bike hire scheme, on the lines of the highly successful Velib
scheme of Paris. The mayor wants an 80 per cent rise in cycling by 2010 in
the city from 2000 levels. 


 


London Cycling Campaign, in conjunction with Transport for London, the
official transport authority, have recently come out with the second edition
of a cycling route map for London and its surroundings. (The first edition
was out in 2002, indicating that trying to push the bike in the heart of
London is not a new fad after Al Gore opened everyone's eyes to the
"inconvenient truth".) The map is distributed free. The cycling movement in
Britain is of course not confined to London and its mayor with
unconventional ideas. The government has announced a 140 million pounds plan
to promote cycling in entire England. 


 


Indian cities are routinely chopping down mature trees, which still have a
long life ahead of them, to make way for road expansion. Some of the bigger
ones have already built or are planning elevated expressways to ease traffic
flow. These are being contemplated after flyovers or over bridges, often
financed by the central urban renewal mission and which any Indian city
worth its salt now has by the dozen, failed to reduce the traffic jams. It
should be as clear as the bright daylight that the creator has blessed most
of India with that flyovers, expressways, ground level or elevated, and
widened roads not only do not solve traffic problems but make them worse.
Yet we persist with the folly. 

subir.roy at bsmail.in