Adding to the city’s infrastructure to ease congestion on its roads will have little or no impact on the traffic.
Every day around 1,500 to 2,000 new vehicles come out on the roads due to the easily availability of loans and building of more flyovers and underpasses will only encourage people to opt for their own transport.
What we need to do instead is ensure better end- to- end connectivity and encourage people to leave their vehicles at home and use public transport. The government should invest in public transport and make it attractive to people by providing proper connectivity, stations at the right locations and better frequency of buses and metro trains.
It should also introduce suburban trains to help reduce traffic and go ahead with its bicycle sharing scheme, which is still on paper. Satellite bus stations could also ease the traffic congestion, though not entirely remove it.
We need to adopt a few of the policies of places like Copenhagen, where people need to pay a 110 per cent tax to buy a vehicle. Singapore and many other countries too have similar policies and charge a high parking fee.
Such policies, if implemented in our country, could help in reducing traffic and pollution on our roads.
