There is a rush of blood to my head. “It’s criminal!” My mind silently spews out these words. “It’s criminal!” I spew out the words again, this time through gritted teeth. All around me are cars, empty except for the driver. My mind is filled with disgust, especially for those driving the bigger cars. The road is narrow. The cars are innumerable. The traffic is reduced to a crawl. “When will they realise?” I ask myself silently, sitting alone at the wheel of my hatchback.
Pathetic double standards – clearly. That’s a character flaw I have to wrestle with. That’s not the point of this column. It is about congested, slow-moving traffic, and how it shamelessly helps itself to our time, eating it away in seconds, minutes and hours. The incident I narrated happened around 10 a.m. today, while I was driving down from Medavakkam to Sholinganallur. I crawled on four tyres from Medavakkam to Perumbakkam, taking over 25 minutes to navigate a distance of two-and-a-half kilometres.
As I was inching towards Sholinganallur, I was reminded of a Facebook post Harsha Koda shared with me three years ago. Harsha, a fellow resident of Sholinganallur, works in the start-up space and is a 24/7 activist, always on the lookout for causes. Around three years ago, when the Sholinganallur junction was pathetically swollen every day with rush-hour traffic, Harsha was an active participant in the police-public interactions organised to resolve the issue. During the height of this problem, Harsha shared this Facebook post, which contains details of a study carried out by someone — probably, a software engineer — who has had a taste of rush-hour traffic on OMR. The ‘researcher’, who remains nameless to me, seems to have a measure of the traffic problem in and around OMR. He knew what it was doing to the software companies and professionals functioning there. He computed the unnecessary loss of fuel and productivity, and presented figures that were quite shocking.
When I was going through the shared Facebook post, I was impressed with the effort. At the same time, I thought one more component could have been added to the computation. The loss of smiles, hugs and quiet moments with loved ones. The ‘researcher’ probably left them out, because it’s difficult — nay, impossible — to put a number on any of these things. They are of inestimable value and far too precious to do that.
As anyone would know, I am not discussing a problem unique to OMR. It is an urban problem, experienced in all cities where development is not sufficiently transit-oriented. With efficiently and attractively designed mass rapid transit systems on all major corridors, there is a possibility that some of the drivers in those empty cars would abandon the wheel for quicker and cheaper travel.
Of course, there will be others who may not want to give up the wheel for a mass rapid transit system, no matter how quick, efficient and classy it is. They may, however, have a change of heart, if they come to realise what they are missing out on. That is, if they start counting the smiles, hugs and kisses that could have been.
