Read From The Kathmandu Post
APR 14 , 2012
The Road Department is planning to build three additional flyovers in
the Airport-Kalanki segment, besides the one already planned in New
Baneswor (Upatyakama thap teen flyovers, Nagarik, April 12). The road
department claims that these flyovers will smooth the flow of traffic on
the Airport-Kalanki segment, according to the report. About a dozen
cars of different shapes, sizes and colours dot the sketch of flyovers
posted on the newspaper website. This sketch is probably supplied by the
Road Department. The absence of any public bus on that sketch is
telling, although we cannot perhaps impute any intention based on this
sketch. But the very idea of flyovers as the solution to Kathmandu’s
transportation problems is based on grossly distorted understanding of
the problems. A good scientific research is based on asking good questions, social scientists are regularly told. When you ask bad questions, you end up with bad answers. When those answers become the basis of public interventions, we often end up with mess such as the one we are seeing in transport planning in Kathmandu. The key question that planners at the Road Department are asking is: “how can we create new infrastructure so that the growing numbers of motorised vehicles could run smoothly?” When you assume growth of private motorised vehicles as given, and motorisation as the main means of mobility, the inevitable choice would be more flyovers and bigger roads.
The soil test results or close circuit television camera recordings might give their work a cover of scientific practice, what they are doing is not transport planning in the first place. They are doing road planning. The preliminary reports of the recent census shows that there are about four million people living in the valley. For the size of Kathmandu valley, this is very high density. These flyovers might address the needs of only a very small section of car-owning class in Kathmandu. The high density urbanisation calls for good mass transit and walkable and bicyclable public spaces.
In the absence of any public policy to curb the growth of private motor vehicles, the expansion of flyovers will be totally ineffective in dealing with the gridlocks, the sanitised presentation of the sketch aside. Any plan to curb the growth of private vehicles will be ineffective in the absence of good mass transit system and promotion of bicycling and walking.
These high-price projects will drain public resources that could otherwise be used in designing and implementing functional public transportation system. The problem with big infrastructure projects is that once built they will block the possibilities for good initiatives for a long time to come. Once built, you cannot remove the flyovers without decimating the value of investment. In fact, they will become burden, rather than public asset.
The increased investment in flyovers is planned at a time when we are formalising the federal governance. Maoists continue to justify their ten-year bloody war on the ground that the centralisation of power and resources in Kathmandu has been one of the main reasons for regional and social inequalities. No other than Nepal’s foremost Marxist ideologue, Baburam Bhattarai wrote his PhD on exactly this question. He and his comrades never tire of scientific approach to social change. Yet, he has become the cheerleader of these faulty projects. There is something deeply amiss here.
The Road Department’s sanitised sketch notwithstanding, these flyovers will also be outright dangerous to the area they pass through. The Tripureshwor-Kalanki stretch is one of the most compact multi-use areas in the valley. People have small shops. Families live in upper story apartments. What will an elevated motorway do to those living there? What kind of life a child in this area will live, for instance? I don’t think our planners are used to asking these questions. I sometimes even wonder if they think about their own children at all. They might know which area has what kind of soil so that they could design flyovers accordingly, but they don’t know how their work will address the needs of city’s children. They might know at what speed a private car can move from one point of the city to another point, they do not know how city’s car-less majority can fulfill their mobility needs.
The basic thing is road planning and transport planning are not synonymous. Transport planning is concerned with mobility and larger vision of the city. Roads and flyovers are only two among many other ways of addressing the mobility needs of citizens. The tragedy in Nepal, it seems, is that road planners have assumed the role of city planners.
Good city planning involves asking different sets of problems. Why do people move? How are mobility needs different for different social groups? What are the diverse ways we can fulfill those needs? How best can we address their needs? How can our interventions achieve social justice and livable space while addressing social justice? We have to ask these questions because not all public interventions contribute to better vision for the city. Before we get lured into sanitised presentation of smoothly moving cars on the elevated highways, we have to give thoughts to better ways of addressing the mobility needs.
anilbhattarai@gmail.com
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