Road widening is an unintelligent and unjust project to address traffic congestion

(A slightly revised version of  article has also been published by Deccan Herald in its Sunday edition of 24 June 2012 and is accessible here)

Recently the High Court of Karnataka held that the widening of the road from Sadashivanagar to Yeshwantpur did not violate the principle of prior and informed public consent as contained in the Karnataka Town and Country Planning Act.  It accepted the Bangalore Development Authority's contention that since the proposal to widen the road to 30 metres was part of the Comprehensive Development Plan of Bangalore in 1984, it was unnecessary to inform the public every decade when this plan was revised. The High Court then claimed that “widening roads is the only means to over come traffic congestion”, even as it acknowledged that the Karnataka Directorate of Urban Land Transport's “cutting edge scientific analysis” advocated several progressive measures could be adopted to relieve traffic congestion and widening was not a solution for this road. While the import of this judgment is limited to Sadashivnagar Road, it is indicative of the thinking amongst key decision makers who believe that we can build wide roads to relieve traffic congestion in Bangalore and other urban areas.

Quite in contrast, major cities world over are working to constrict spaces for private automobile movement, especially in core city areas.  Providing safe pathways to encourage people to cycle, walk and use public transport (mainly bus based), are the new age technologies of mobility.  Seoul the capital of South Korea recently tore down a massive expressway running through its city and turned it into a pedestrian's and cyclist's delight. Curitiba in Brazil and Bogota in Colombia are South American examples of how city governments invested in low carbon intensive public transport projects, supported by walking and cycling; not car friendly (and pedestrian unfriendly) wide roads that waste millions of dollars, dismember old neighbourhoods and only aggravate the congestion problem.

Many metropolitan areas of North America are regretting having widened roads in the past to accommodate cars.  They are now energetically rebuilding cycling and pedestrian paths, and bus systems. In Boston, a network of railroads and expressways cuting through the core city was pushed underground, and the reclaimed surface turned into an 8 mile long Braddock Park Corridor filled with children's parks, cycling paths, community gardens, and what not. The result is that local economies have been energised and crime rates have dropped.  Many European cities are using innovative land use policies to protect charming old inner city neighbourhoods, rejecting car based transport, and encouraging cycling, walking and street vending.  Think Amsterdam, Dresden, Paris (yes, you can rent public cycles here).  In Africa, Durban leads.  Last year the city hosted UN Climate Change talks and its municipality acted by promoting cycling and walking, backed by a generous grant of 1,000 cycles from UNIDO to adopt the Paris rent-a-cycle initiative.

As I grew up in Bangalore, I cycled everywhere.  While it was relatively safe to cycle then, it is certainly not the case now.  The lack of foresight of our so-called urban planners has reduced cycling and walking into a death wish today.  A tragedy indeed as nowhere else in the world can we get a city like Bangalore with a climate so conducive for such health securing, money saving and carbon neutral activities. The greater tragedy is that promoting road widening, signal free corridors, elevated expressways and such other mega projects have become a mantra for ensuring political legacy.  Skewed urban imaginations promoted widening of 90 roads during S. M. Krishna's regime, which list has now grown to 216. 

All this when the National Urban Transport Policy, 2007 argues that cities must be so developed as to provide “...equitable allocation of road space with people, rather than vehicles, as its main focus”.  Were Bangalore to actually implement such policy prescriptives, the city would then intelligently re-design streets so that everyone (rich, middle class, poor and differently abled) would have an equal opportunity (physically and economically) to move within the city and with low, or no, risk to life and livelihoods.  Our City and State Governments are instead pursuing mega road widening projects that gobble thousands of crores of rupees of our money  (which we can safely assume have mega cuts for the corrupt as well), even as they admit that technical and financial viability is yet to be assessed. 

It is high time key decision makers abandon this myopic approach, step back a bit and think conscientiously with the people the wastefulness and wretchedness such projects result in.  Felling hundreds of gloriously grown avenue trees (the true heritage of Bangalore), the gross injustice of breaking down hundreds of homes and centuries old businesses (without compensation, for TDR is not), and the inhumane displacement of thousands of poor street vendors whose livelihoods are tied to the idea that streets are our multi-purpose commons, are all indicative of our disregard for democratic, inclusive and progressive urban life that the Constitution guarantees.  This is also illustrative of the rhetorical abuse of the concept of “sustainable development” to justify carbon intensive, socially unjust, unintelligent and economically unviable mega road widening projects which are bandied about as solutions, when such ideas have long been trashed elsewhere.

Leo F. Saldanha

Coordinator 

Environment Support Group

leo@esgindia.org

www.esgindia.org