[sustran] Improving Lahore's traffic

[Eric.britton]

Reference: LAHORE, May 27: A comprehensive action plan has been drawn up
to improve traffic system in the province and a pilot project will be
launched at the Ferozepur Road stretch from Qartaba Chowk to the Lahore
General Hospital.

 

I would like to respectfully comment on the article that friend Hassaan
has shared with our group today, and behind the article on the pilot
project that is as I understand it summarily described in the above
excerpt.  Two things in particular bother me about the project, the
first that it focuses on "traffic" and then that it will look at a
specific link.  But I would like to put this before the group as a whole
for comment since I may, as often, be very far from the truth on this.

 

"Improving traffic" is basically a technical exercise which has as its
underlying goal to improve vehicle throughput, which in turn keys on
higher vehicle speeds.  Now this is something that traffic and transport
engineers are very good at, and all the more so when the problem is
reduced to optimization of vehicle throughput on a specific link.  I am
sure that the new traffic management unit will do a fine job of that.

 

However the big problem with this - it is a huge problem actually - is
that it provides a clear step in a process which risks later to become
the approach and tool set needed for public policy for the Government of
Punjab, state-wide.  This would to my mind be a step in the wrong
direction and be the  harbinger of many and large future problems for
mobility, the environment and quality of life in the Punjab.  A step,
seemingly so useful and benign in itself, that would lock the Punjab
into the same vicious cycle that we have seen destroying quality of life
in many places. (Hanna Arendt once called this process - in a
transportation context mind you - an example of "the banality of evil",
if that is not to put too strong a point to it.)

 

Okay, dear colleagues. Now here's the rub.  If we have this process
already underway and this first step apparently to be taken - what is it
that we as voices of sustainable transportation can possibly do to
reverse or mitigating this process - or best of all transform it into
something that is going to be useful to deal with the worst of the
problems out there on the roads today, while at the same time creating a
new mindset that will permit more effective problems solving and public
action in the future?  Not so easy, eh?

 

One of the reasons that some of us continue to insist of the concept of
'new mobility' as a goal as opposed to care and feeding of traffic and
vehicle systems - is precisely because we are hopeful that this
apparently small vocabulary shift will bring with it a new and quite
different sets of underlying attitudes and priorities. Those in fact
which certainly just about every person here shares. 

 

To end with my question: So, how do we go about doing this?  What is the
strategy, the process that now has to be engaged to be effective?

 

Eric Britton - from Paris on the annual Day of Music

 

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firmly on the path to a more sustainable and more just society.

 

 

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