Divining reasons for the state of traffic

Last Christmas season my family and I fled tourist-invaded Goa for some peace and quiet. Little did we realize, despite friendly advice, that our destination, Sri Lanka, was also one of those holiday favourites that gets flooded at Christmas time. Along the five days that we were on the island, in addition to experiencing the incredible beauty of the country, we were also forced to spend much of our time in traffic jams, whether in the capital city Colombo, in Kandy, home of the famous Temple of the Tooth, or on the roads between these two cities.

I had been to the island-state some years prior to this family holiday, and I am sure that the country I witnessed was entirely different in terms of the amount of traffic that one experienced. If anything, my journeys then were experiences of smooth flows from one destination to another. It appears that the end of the decades-long civil war may have released extra income into the economy creating the kind of spurt in traffic that one witnessed on my last trip.

Yet, despite the fact that we spent a good amount of time in traffic jams our experience of traffic in Sri Lanka was not the same as that in India, and/or Goa. A traffic jam in India is an occasion for tons of honking and attempts by individuals to cut through the traffic jam by getting onto the opposite lane and charging to the head of the line. Others follow the lead of the first offender which ensures that within a matter of minutes the jam has been complicated beyond imagining and that instead of two lanes, one has multiple lanes, tempers rise and what could have been resolved within a shorter time takes forever to be repaired. 

In the course of the short stay in Sri Lanka my experiences of traffic jams were anything but similar. To begin with traffic jams were the result not of indiscipline, but because of the usual reason for the phenomena, too much traffic on small lanes. Rather than cut across lanes and try to short circuit the system people waited patiently for the traffic to move. It took us a couple of minutes to realize that our experience of the first jam in Sri Lanka was different from what we encountered in India. There was no honking! So strange was the situation that we could just not contain ourselves, and kept repeating this fact, over and over again, to ourselves, and then when we returned home to every one we met.

How can this difference between the road experience in India and Sri Lanka be explained? While in Sri Lanka I did notice that there were clear signs, at least in Colombo, indicating that lane discipline had to be maintained at all time, and the presence of traffic police at regular intervals. Speaking with the driver of the cab we employed we got the sense that the police are invariably on hand to take any offender to task. Responding to our queries he also suggested that it was unlikely that the police would accept bribes from offenders.

In the course of our journey, as we grew close to our driver, he shared much with us about his country. What I would like to focus on, as I try and resolve this question of the traffic discipline in Sri Lanka, is his narratives about the State. He spoke about the health care system that offered free, reliable and dependable service to all Sri Lankans. Trying to build a pattern from all that I had heard from him, I realized that in Sri Lanka the people were assured of an ever present state that was reliable, and dependable. I doubt that the same could be said about India. 

In India, one knows that one cannot rely on the state to maintain the law. The infrastructure of the state is invariably seen as tools to enrich those who gain access to public office. The enforcement of the law is not uniform. Any one in Goa will acknowledge that if one has connections to the officer’s superiors one can get away not only without a fine, but after having insulted the traffic officer. In other words, in India one knows that the state will not look after you, nor will it work to create a level playing ground. You have to look out for yourself in a dog eat dog world. In other words, it is not rules that help you get ahead in India, but the violation of rules, and muscling in on a scene gives you more than waiting patiently in line. The absence of a traffic etiquette in India is therefore the result of a failed state.

In sum, it seems that if there is a difference between traffic behavior in Sri Lanka and India, the reason can be pinned down to the fact that at least at the level of the average citizen, the Sri Lankan state is seen to be a neutral arbiter of rules that are taken seriously, while in India, one knows that the state has abandoned its role and made way for the so-called laws of the jungle to take root.

(A version of this post was first published in The Goan, on 10 April 2016)

No Street-side stalls, No Sidewalks: Foundations for an unsafe and gridlocked Panjim City

There are two parallel processes currently on in the city of Panjim that paints for us a picture of the future of the city. The picture that emerges from these two processes is not very pretty.

The first of the two processes is the evacuation of the street-side stalls (gadas) from various parts of Panjim city. This evacuation of the stalls should not be seen as a bolt out of the blue. It is merely the conclusion of a process that was set in motion approximately half a decade ago when a group of ‘conscientious’ citizens pleaded before the High Court that the presence of these stalls impeded the free and unrestricted access of pedestrians in the city of Panjim. A whole vision was conjured up, one that compared Panjim city to the cities in the more developed parts of the world. It was argued that if we wanted a fair impression of our city, and a respect for the rights of pedestrians, then these stalls would have to be removed. In response to this petition, the stalls were removed from various parts of the city and concentrated in two areas; the first around the park behind the Printing Press and the second on the street by the Masano do Amorim. It is possible that these owners of these stalls thought that their miseries were over, however experience of the operation of the Indian developmental state, clearly indicates that these expectations were clearly foolish. Once you are pushed out of a location, then it is only a matter of time, before you are finished-off completely. This has been the experience of rural communities displaced for developmental projects, and the experience of other communities displaced in urban contexts for ‘the greater good of all’.

There doesn’t seem to have been any serious argument forwarded that the discrete location of these street-side stalls catered to the healthy functioning of the city, as it serviced small needs of homes and offices in the area, and the needs of persons of marginal economic means. The concentration of these stalls in two areas was in fact a displacement from their meaningful context. Setting the owners of these stalls up in the new market complex may address the issue of their livelihood, but what will it do to the economic and social life of the city? Will it force us to travel (not walk) longer distances for the small essentials that these shops sold? Will it kill the activity on our streets thereby creating empty roads that are the perfect setting for criminal and anti-social activity?

Before I move on to the next point, I would like to stress that a main plank of the arguments against these stalls was that they were encroaching on to public space and preventing easy pedestrian access to the side walk on which they were located.

The second process that is unfolding in Panjim city is the covering over of the road-side gutters with cement grilles. This process should normally be welcome, except that the process of covering the gutter, has resulted in the erasure of difference between the road and the side-walk. The two areas, once clearly demarcated by the presence of an open gutter have in many places merged into one single area. The result of this merging is that we already have vehicles encroaching onto the sidewalk, vehicles being parked on the side-walk leaving no space for the humble pedestrian. In addition, it has created the context to create rouge traffic in the city.

If the displacement of the street-side stalls was about the opening up of space for pedestrians, then the second process is clearly operating contrary to this logic. It appears that, as is the case with most Indian cities, Panjim too is giving way to the cancer that is eating up our cities. The road is eating away at the city to create the city as a space for the new deity of our age, the automobile. The logic of the automobile is dictating our decisions, even as we see our cities morphing into spaces that are unlivable thanks to the cancerous growth of the road.

The two processes ongoing in Panjim make sense if we examine the whole issue from a class-sensitive point of view. The persons who initially moved the petition against the street-side carts are not those who normally walk or cycle through the city, they are elites who are more used to driving through the city and making their purchases at either upmarket stores, or at the central market in Panjim. The street-side stall therefore operated only as an eye-sore to them, a place where the lower order gathered. The rhetoric of the pedestrian was therefore merely a tool to mask their cosmetic agenda of creating a pretty view of the city as they drove past. The simultaneous process of the widening of the roads to include the sidewalks only serves to underline the truth of my suggestion. There is a disdain being displayed here for the rights of pedestrians, disabled, children, aged and cyclists, who use the side-walks and rely on boundaries between the road and the side-walk for their safety. The expansion of the road benefits only the automobile owner, who is by and large, a member of the middle class.

The picture that emerges for Panjim city is a city that operates to service the automobile and the classes that can access the automobile. This does not augur well either for the aesthetics of our city, nor for the safety of the denizens of the city. The city would be much better served if the city catered to all segments of the citizenry, catering to them via street-side stalls, central markets and up-market stores. The city would be a much safer place if it were made pedestrian (and disabled person) friendly. The city would be much safer if it encouraged a street-life that ensures a public eye on the streets at almost all times of the day. This public eye is generated through the provision for street-cafes and pedestrian zones. The city would be much healthier if it created a movement-network that encouraged walking, cycling in association with reliable and (disabled) people-friendly public transport, rather than catering to the all(oil)-consuming, pollutant-spewing private automobile.

There is a certain refusal to share that marks our times. In this case a refusal to share public space with the economically and socially marginal. What is unfolding in Panjim is a part of this process. We would all be better served if we stood up in defence of the rights of street-side stalls to discreetly place themselves on our streets. We would be better served if we stood up and demanded that our side-walks be made secure for pedestrians, that segments of roads be marked out for cyclists and for public transport that has right of way. In so many ways Goa is lucky to still have these options before us. If we don’t seize these options now, we will wind up making our cities and towns unsafe and impersonal spaces, full of smog-belching vehicles in grid-lock.

(Published in the Gomantak Times 18th Feb 2009)