TRAFFIC

This time I took a longish break, it is like coming back from a long maternity leave. I was involved in couple of projects and it took major chunk of my time. I missed all of you. I beg your pardon for being away for so long. Feeling great to be back. 

 There was a news item in Hindustan Times, that Mumbai will be the first Indian city to begin traffic restrictions on the basis of number plate. Beijing used a similar scheme just before the Olympics to decongest the city and bring down pollution levels.

Athens, Mexico City and Sao Paulo restrict use of vehicles based on their number plates.

Traffic cops really face a tough time managing a huge traffic in hot, humid and polluted conditions in our cities. 

 “I think my police force is doing what they can given the conditions. We have 900 policemen for 35 lakh vehicles and out of the 35 lakhs, a large number comes under potential violators. Given a chance, all of us will break rules. We are not a naturally compliant society,” says Praveen Sood, Commissioner of Police, Bangalore, in Citizen Matters. Praveen is a graduate from IIT Delhi, is doing a great job in spite of deficiencies and handicaps in his department.

I came across an interesting review of a book called “Traffic” by Tom Vanderbilt in New York Times. 

According to him, traffic jams are not, by and large, caused by flaws in road design but by flaws in human nature. While this is bad news for drivers — there’s not much to be done about human nature — it is good news for readers of Tom Vanderbilt’s new book. “Traffic” is not a dry examination of highway engineering; it’s a surprising, enlightening look at the psychology of human beings behind the steering wheels.

An alternate title for the book might be “Idiots.”

In a study of one 15-block area near U.C.L.A., cars were logging, on an average day, 3,600 miles in pursuit of a place to park. It’s not only the number of parkers on the roads that slows things down. It’s the way they drive, crawling along, sitting and waiting and engaging in other irritating examples of what one expert calls “parking foreplay.” The answer? Sorry: more expensive street parking to encourage the circling hordes to use pay lots.

Writes Vanderbilt, traffic does not yield to simple, appealing solutions. Adding lanes or roads is a short-lived fix. Widen one highway, and drivers from another will defect. Soon that road is worse than it was before. The most effective, least popular solution — aside from the currently effective, unpopular solution of $5-a-gallon gasoline — is congestion pricing: charging extra to use roads during rush hours. For unknown reasons, Americans will accept a surcharge for peak-travel-time hotel rooms and airfares but not for roads.

If it’s any consolation, traffic has always been bad. Vanderbilt begins with a short section on the history of traffic congestion. By studying chariot “rutways” and “wear patterns on curbstones,” archaeologists have determined that the citizens of Pompeii had to contend with construction detours and one-way streets.

 Meanwhile, in ancient Rome, “the chariot traffic grew so intense that Caesar … declared a daytime ban on carts and chariots, ‘except to transport construction materials for the temples of the gods or for other great public works or to take away demolition materials.

“Nowadays, the cause of collisions, or one of them, is people believing they’re better drivers than they are. We base our judgment on the number of crashes we’ve been in, rather than on the number of accidents we narrowly avoid, which, if we’re being honest (or we’re being me), happen just about every time we drive. Compounding this vehicular hubris is the fact that most of the driving we do appears to be safer than it is.

Driving rarely commands 100 percent of our attention, and so we feel comfortable multitasking: talking on the phone, unfolding a map and looking sideways etc.

Vanderbilt cites a statistic that nearly 80 percent of crashes involve drivers not paying attention for up to three seconds. Thus the places that seem the most dangerous — narrow roads, hairpin turns — are rarely where people mess up. “Most crashes,” Vanderbilt writes, “happen on dry roads, on clear, sunny days, to sober drivers.”

For this reason, roads that could be straight are often constructed with curves — simply to keep drivers on the ball.

In a recent survey conducted by American job website Careerbuilder.com in the US, nearly 40 per cent of employees blamed traffic or long commute for causing their late arrival to the workplace.  

Given worse traffic conditions in Indian cities, and the ever-growing traffic in cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata, experts believe this percentage would be higher in India than in US.

Would it be nice if employees instead of wasting time in travelling could utilize it more efficiently from the precincts of their homes.  Many Indian companies even the ones with traditional mindsets are giving the option to its employees to work from home.