Keeping it Going

Would congestion disappear if we somehow magically manage to widen to all the roads in the city? Is traffic management all about road widening? Ashwin Mahesh, the head of Mapunity Information Services, discusses some of the fundamental issues about traffic and argues that analysis and information is the way out. Better Traffic Ahead Urban traffic is, to put it mildly, a space gone so awry that even restoring a semblance of order is going to be a challenge for many years. 1. Our cities generally do not have metro area-wide traffic and transport planning authorities with jurisdiction, resources and latitude to solve the problem. In most cities, traffic is 'managed' by a group of role-players from various representative departments - the utility boards, bus operators, traffic police, urban development authorities, the municipality. But with each of these institutions mostly engaged in its own challenges, there is little opportunity or room for developing solutions. In some cities, transport committees are also stacked with persons of questionable value to the city or to public administration, as politicians happily hand out patronage jobs without regard to qualification or skill. 2. Positions in government are no longer attractive to technical problem-solvers, and the likelihood of public administrators themselves hitting upon solutions also is small. "Traffic management is like chip design," my colleague Srikanth Nadhamuni, himself a former chip designer, used to say. Meaning, that if you try to solve the problem piece-meal in one or two locations, it will simply re-surface elsewhere. What is needed, instead, is network analysis and design that allows the entire complexity of relationships between various points to be understood. And people who can do those things are turning their backs on government jobs; their economic and intellectual rewards in private industry are simply too much greater. 3. Inevitably, all of these structural and societal problems arrive at the doorstep of the traffic police, who are expected to manage - and even improve - traffic conditions, despite having very little authority in so many of the areas that impact traffic - like land use, vehicle registration, transport pricing, road development, and equally, very little latitude to hire and retain technically skilled personnel. While the police too have copped their share of criticism, it is certainly true that today's traffic police, in particular the lower ranks, work in abominable health conditions, amidst extreme physical danger to themselves. Police duty is also round-the-clock, and highly subject to the expectations of politicians; this results in a virtual beck-and-call situation for most personnel. Of course, traffic can be worrisome even in well developed cities, but short of a revolution in urban land-use and transport, especially public transport, there are few options available to public administrators. With the result that most civil servants in charge of traffic tend to look for measures that alleviate the problems. This is understandable, given that actually solving the problem requires many other things to happen - including a restructuring of governance - that are all unlikely soon. Read More: Better Traffic Ahead