God Save Me From The Traffic!

[ritu 1]

Let me share with you a few experiences I have witnessed after staying in Mumbai for a long time. See it is a huge city, there are so many opportunities for people here, so there is an inward flow of population. But the infrastructural development hasn't taken place proportionately, so the city has grown overpopulated. Among many other problems, lies the one of heavy traffic. Anyways it takes so much of time to travel from one part of the city to another, and on top of that if you need to face traffic, it gets so worse. You can find people in various conditions when stuck in traffic, once when I was in a bus and a young guy felt like puking, the bus couldn't be opened for him as it was blocked on both sides, the poor fellow had to bear the pain of waiting for almost half an hour till the bus's door opened, then there was a Diabetic who had to urinate urgently but couldn't and almost fainted due to that, in my own case, while on a visit to Lokhandwala locality in Andheri , we had to remain stuck in the traffic for about Three hours!!!! can you imagine our plight? It was summer, sweat had drained everything out of us and inside the car we felt suffocating, nearly choked, it was time we decided to walk out of the car that the queue of cars began to move. It was awful. Very often the children become worst sufferers in traffic, especially babies, I can well understand traffic, celebrities and social activists are often found complaining about the same. The possible solution that the government can opt for is construction of more roads and fly-over bridges, a better planned traffic regulation system can bring effective changes also specially on the western side of the city, as it takes more than hour to go from Jogeshwari to Goregaon,at peak hours. Hopefully the authorities would take a stern step to solve this issue.

[freespeech2012 0]

Traffic congestion in Mumbai is an all too familiar story: …am sure there are loads of people from all around the country who will have similar experiences to share.

Issues of Traffic congestion, inadequate public transport, poor road infrastructure, inappropriate urban planning and design are all inter-related, and there have been plenty of debates and discussions by experts, government agencies and civic authorities over the years. However, every once in a while, we get awful days when we become victims of harrowing traffic.

It is when we pause and think about the various things that the administration could do to ease the situation, but I would like to highlight the role of people here. I believe that civic sense and discipline is immensely important in ensuring an effective traffic management.

How many times do we notice, drivers jumping signals, pedestrians happily jaywalking, vehicles being parked in designated no parking zones, one-way rules openly disobeyed…I guess it is high time we as ‘users of public amenities’ respected and followed rules and regulations for our own betterment!
Edited April 20, 2012 by moderator (see edit history)