| 09 November 2004 | Tuesday | 25 Ramazan 1425 |
An exercise in futility
The intelligent way of beating traffic jams
An American, Dr Peggy J. Levitt, was in Karachi for 11 days recently on an interesting mission - to meet family members of some of the Pakistani immigrants settled in Boston.
A research fellow at the Haxser Centre for non-profit organizations at Harvard University, Dr Levitt doubles as associate professor in the sociology department at Wellesley College. Her subject of research is immigrant communities living in Boston, "who remain connected with their mother country," and she focuses on four communities - the Irish who migrated after 1965, the Brazilians who migrated from Governadir Valadares, a city of 300,000, immigrants from Pakistan and the state of Gujarat in India.
Why the Irish after 1965 and why Brazilians and Indians from specific places? "Boston has been a city of immigrants and the Irish who migrated after 1965, when immigration laws were relaxed, are in many ways different from the Irish who moved to the US before the 1920s. The new Irish are more educated and have more money than their countrymen who crossed the Atlantic much earlier. The new Irish are in large numbers in Boston and so are the Brazilians and the Gujaratis. But more educated than the last two are the Pakistanis."
The Pakistanis are white-collar professionals and entrepreneurs, and are mostly on higher economic and education levels than the Gujaratis, who came as semi-skilled workers and, once they were well settled, invited and hosted their relatives, who too were not very well educated.
Dr Levitt met the parents of the 50 Pakistanis she had identified for her survey, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that almost all of them were able to communicate with her in English, which is a far cry from the parents of immigrants from Gujarat - only one-third of them could understand English. The Pakistanis she met are all from Karachi, while the Gujaratis are from Ahmedabad, Baroda, Anand and the lesser known town of Bodeli. While on the Irish, Dr Levitt says that the Irish government is doing all that it can to get the new Irish immigrants back, since they are highly educated and professionally competent and will be assets to the country of their origin. Quite a good number of them have gone back.
Why is she restricting her research to Boston? "In the second stage I will extend my survey to other US cities," Dr Levitt says. She says members of the Pakistani community like any other immigrant communities socialize with one another, but they socialize with the white Americans also. Unlike the Brazilians who live together in three or four localities, the Pakistanis are spread out in different parts of Boston. But they do have their own grocery stores and restaurants. The businessmen among the Pakistanis have formed an active body, which is known as OPEN (Organization of Pakistani Entrepreneurs).
Herself a third generation immigrant from Lithuania, Dr Levitt says that all immigrants tend to become more religious and also cling to the images of the countries as they were when they left their native shores behind. The Indians, for instance, are quite surprised when they go home to find that their cities have become more westernized. "The Gujaratis in Boston are as different from the Indians working in the Silicon Valley, as the Pakistani taxi drivers are from the professionals in New England."
Dr P. Levitt says she wasn't scared of coming to Pakistan even though her friends in the US had painted a grim picture of the country. "I am glad I came because I gained first-hand knowledge about the people I wanted to interview. Communications through phone calls and emails would have been very poor substitutes for face-to-face meetings.... Not for a moment have I felt threatened in Karachi. Remember, you can be at the wrong place, at the wrong time, anywhere in the world."
While the people she interviewed were largely based in the more affluent areas of Karachi, she did go to an older and less prosperous part of the city. The purpose was to meet the one and only Abdus Sattar Edhi. Quite predictably she was highly impressed with the stupendous scale on which Mr Edhi and his organization operate. "It was heartwarming to note that the Edhi Foundation's work is not confined to the city where it is headquartered.
It operates all over Pakistan and when the need arises it helps the needy outside the country as well. He has gained the trust of so many people, which is simply amazing," said the shalwar-qameez-dupatta clad research scholar. She picked up the dress in Ahmedabad and finds it quite comfortable.
The last point that Dr Levitt raised was that there was much less tolerance in the world today. "We don't listen to each other. We only think our viewpoint is correct and authentic. Another problem is that we believe in whatever we learn from the news media, which like Fox News, for instance, can be very misleading," she concluded.
An exercise in futility
Refering to a proposal to set up a 'national water council' to settle the issue of new reservoirs, Kawish says that only the Council of Common Interests has the constitutional authority to resolve controversies between provinces and the federation. Instead of convening the CCI, the move to establish the NWC suggests that the government wants to forge a 'consensus' on the sensitive issue through its ministers.
As for the stakeholders, three provinces have rejected the Kalabagh dam, through people's protests and their provincial assemblies. Even the incumbent chief minister of Sindh and the former federal minister of water and power have expressed reservations over the project. In such a situation, finding a 'consensus' would mean that three provinces would have to surrender to the will of one province, which is not going to happen at any cost.
Even then if the government wants a consensus to emerge on the issue, the daily says, it should first undertake some confidence-building measures. In this regard, the implementation of the water accord of 1991, to which chief ministers of the four provinces have already agreed, should be ensured. Besides, the idea of the water council should be dropped and the issue of the dam should be taken up in the CCI.
Praising the Sindh government's move to settle the dispute between fishermen and Rangers, Awami Awaz says that the fishing right of local fishermen in the Badin waters should be restored and the Rangers' role should be confined to guarding borders, because their involvement in commercial activities can adversely affect their professional capability. Moreover, measures should be taken to help Sindh's fishermen whose condition is constantly deteriorating.
The paper points out that the acute water shortage the province has been facing for a decade has reduced the fish population in the River Indus and destroyed fish hatcheries in the delta. Release of saline water and industrial waste into the Manchhar Lake has poisoned its waters, almost culminating the lake fish. As a result, the fisherman's source of livelihood is shrinking and they are migrating to other places or switching to other jobs. If the government does not come to their rescue, hundreds of thousands of people may have to starve and a fascinating part of Sindh folk culture will vanish.
Commenting on the protest movement launched by contractual teachers in different parts of the province, Ibrat says that they should be given preference in recruitment in the education department. According to the teachers, they were recruited on the basis of merit and have been serving for three years.
They allege that despite the provincial education minister's order to regularize their services, some officials are hindering the process. If this is correct, the daily says, the minister should take steps to redress the teachers' grievances.
Hilal-i-Pakistan stresses the need to pay special attention to primary education and calls for reducing the number of subjects being taught at this level and improving the quality of curriculum.
The intelligent way of beating traffic jams
If a study were to be conducted on travelling within the capital, it would surely reveal that commuters are spending more time stuck up in traffic jams. These traffic jams occur during rush hour in the mornings and in the afternoons, especially at the traffic light junctions. The result is that motorists are taking more than double the time to reach a particular destination during rush hour than during a non-rush hour period.
An executive whose office is near Zero Point travels three times a week during afternoon rush hour to a university in E-9 sector to deliver lectures. The easiest route is through Faisal Avenue but because of the traffic congestion at numerous traffic signals along this main road, he takes half an hour to reach his destination whereas the same trip during non-rush hour would take him only 10 minutes.
Not only does a particular trip take longer during rush hour but rush hours also seem to be lasting longer. The same executive recollects that some five years ago, traffic congestion usually lasted about half an hour or so during rush hour but now it lasts much longer, especially in the afternoons.
Traffic in the capital also used to be relatively more lane- conscious and disciplined as compared to other major cities, the executive continued. But it is less so now, he lamented, especially during rush hour.
In recent years, the capital's transportation infrastructure has been characterized by high vehicle growth, delays in construction that could help ease traffic flow, insufficient parking at major commercial centres and markets, and weak public transportation. Add all this to the increased number of kilometres people are travelling and driving each day, and the result is chronic traffic congestion.
Traffic jams are not only time-wasting and exasperating for commuters and motorists but are also causing higher fuel consumption, higher emissions of pollutants, and more accidents. It will be interesting to calculate the total cost in monetary terms which such traffic jams are causing the capital every year.
Only recently, some widening of major arteries, like the Faizabad-Zero Point portion of the Islamabad Highway, is taking place. But work on other long proposed congestion relieving measures like a flyover at Zero Point and underpasses/overpasses elsewhere in the city have yet to start.
The condition of the existing public transport, where buses and wagons are bursting at the seams with passengers during rush hour, is a reflection of the deficiency of a decent and reliable system of public transportation that commuters can view as an alternative to taking out their own vehicles on the road.
The posting of policemen at major traffic junctions to take over the job of traffic signals was meant in part to help ease the flow of traffic during rush hour. But they often end up compounding the congestion, causing an even longer pile-up of cars behind the signals. The helplessness of the Islamabad traffic police was evident last week when it announced several hopeless measures to ease the increasing traffic congestion.
One of these measures was to declare Jinnah Avenue and Constitution Avenue a silent, horn-free zone. While this may help reduce noise pollution, how this measure can, as has been claimed, help bring improvement in the traffic system is beyond comprehension.
Other measures announced were the installation of banners inscribed with traffic laws at the entry and exit roads of the capital (as if motorists by reading these banners can relieve congestion), and the deployment of traffic policemen at all main chowks (a tried measure which has failed).
The solution to Islamabad's traffic congestion is beyond the scope and jurisdiction of the Islamabad traffic police. What needs to be done is for the federal authorities to buck up on the construction of congestion-relieving structures and the widening of roads.
A closer and more serious look at the feasibility of adopting some kind of mass transport system for the Islamabad- Rawalpindi area is also needed. At the same time, it should also look into how transport authorities elsewhere in the world are going high-tech and managing traffic more efficiently through the adoption of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS).
It has been more than a decade ago that transport authorities in the developed countries realized that simply building more and wider roads is not always a solution to the universal problem of road traffic congestion. Thus ITS, which is the use of computers in the management of traffic, was developed to manage traffic more efficiently and safely. ITS includes a wide range of tools and services derived from advanced information and communication technologies.
The first ITS, which appeared in the late 1960s, were computerized traffic signal control systems designed to make urban traffic flow more smoothly. Over the years, a growing number of increasingly sophisticated products and systems have been developed. Since the second half of the 1990s, developed countries like the US, the European Commission, and even Japan and Australia, have developed ITS strategies at the national, regional and city level to improve the management and thus operational efficiency of their communication infrastructure.
In fact, a World Congress on ITS has been held annually since the 1990s, bringing together leading suppliers and buyers of ITS in the world. The 11th World Congress on ITS was just held last month from 19-22 October in Nagoya, Japan, and the 12th World Congress on ITS will take place from 6-10 November in San Francisco.
In the US, there is a separate ITS unit within the Department of Transportation. China also recognized the need for intelligent traffic systems in its 9th five-year plan which contained a budget of $80,000 to study the applications of ITS in China, and the Chinese police and transportation authorities also secured $2.2 million for research into ITS.
Several Southeast Asian capitals have already adopted ITS measures to relieve traffic congestion since the 1990s. Kuala Lumpur has installed dynamic, vehicle responsive traffic control systems (e.g., synchronized lights) at its traffic intersections. Singapore has had a Green Light Determining System operating since 1988 to adjust signals to minimize congestion delays.
In addition to adopting ITS measures and relying on mass transit to ease traffic congestion, the tiny state of Singapore has also adopted very tough measures to control and curb the car population, e.g., it limits growth in car ownership to three per cent a year through car ownership quotas. Such extreme measures may eventually become necessary here if the federal authorities do not act now to solve the traffic congestion problem in the capital.