The traffic problem in Bengaluru is so bad that by an unspoken agreement, the citizens have decided not to speak about it. When you are late for an appointment, it is no longer acceptable to say, “Well, the traffic, you know …” Everyone knows, so why bring it up? Instead, we say something like, “Our clothes weren’t back from the laundry” or “We were busy watching a tree grow.” We hate to make our politicians feel bad.
We also hope that the less we talk about the traffic problems, the faster they will disappear. It is a legacy from childhood when we believed that the best way to make something happen was not to talk about it.
There is a school of thought which believes we should follow the Italian model and allow vehicles on the footpath. But the supporters of this school had to shut up when it was pointed out that such is already the case. ‘Footpath’ or ‘sidewalk’ (for those who had their education in America) is, like the woolly mammoth, entirely extinct, remembered only by those who have forgotten everything else.
Carpooling, where people going in the same direction hop into the same car to save on time, fuel and amount spent on road repairs, worked for a bit till some of us concluded that we needed a law preventing eleven people from travelling in a single car. I exaggerate, but have you commuted to work in a car bearing six, and started your day at the office smelling of other people’s sweat?
My idea is that no one should be allowed to leave home without first ensuring that someone who had been out had returned. That way the number of people on the road remains a constant, a number that can be worked out in advance. Computers will let us know who has come back in and who is head of the queue to go out.
But people might complain they had to stay at home for 18 months because their computer, which had a problem could not be fixed as no repairmen had got their turn yet. So perhaps not such a good idea after all.
There has been some loose talk of public transport, buses and trains and the like, but it hasn’t got anywhere. Laying roads and tracks would take up too much time, and schoolchildren now would become grandfathers and grandmothers before that happened. Governments seem to have a horror of finishing projects on time. While the rest of us work and stretch our money as far as it will go, our politicians stretch the work to see how far the money will go.
“Everything is as it should be,” said a friend quoting a philosopher who was either Greek or French, he didn’t know which. And that’s where the matter rests now, with the citizens convinced that everything is as it should be, and that all traffic problems are maya, illusion. Who said philosophers were useless in practical life?
