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Role of Community in Reducing Automobile Dependency for a Sustainable Kathmandu
BySUBAS DHAKAL
Several decades of impromptu urban sprawl within a 667 sq km area of Kathmandu Valley has sky-rocketed a demand for driving space. More than 250,000 registered vehicles (one fifth being automobiles) are now estimated to be operating within poorly maintained road infrastructure of mere 1200 km. Anticipation of any slump in automobile ownership due to the fuel price hike and environmental deterioration surely is contradictory to ubiquitous media headlines like ‘recurrent traffic pandemonium’ and ‘double digit growth in car sales’. People within the valley must often wonder how a once peaceful, walkable & cyclable community transformed into a chaotic pile of polluting & honking automobiles. An attempt is made here to voice the need of seeking sustainable alternatives to the mounting automobile dependency at the community level.
Let’s begin by revisiting sustainability in the context of transportation. Ideally, safe and easy access as well as environment-friendly transportation aiming to enhance economic growth and facilitate social well-being can be considered sustainable. However, diminishing capacity of authorities to manage ever-increasing automobiles has made sustainability an ambiguous concept in the valley’s context. Ironically, concerned authorities seem to be driven by a perception that prominent challenge is the helter-skelter traffic in bulk of the ‘bottlenecked’ intersections caused by the narrow roads. Such myopic acumen is evident from the haphazard (mis)utilization of resources to accommodate more automobiles to an extent that pedestrian have simply been stripped away from their rights to walk safely in the name of road-widening. Dire encroachment or complete disappearance of pavements within busy shopping districts (i.e. portions of NewRoad & Dillibazaar area) portrays lack of will to think beyond the car-dependent society for whatever reasons. At any cost, such deeds have contributed to retreating social well-being because root-cause of increasing automobile dependency is not the demand for vehicles itself but rather inability to meet the travel needs of commuters in realistic terms. Renowned Australian Professor, Peter Newman’s years of academic research also points to the fact that increasing driving space (building new and widening existing roads) have a rather boomerang affect in easing congestion as more space becomes available for more automobiles and Kathmandu valley is no different!
Increasing population and commerce have transformed once a medium-paced valley into a vibrant economy. Growing faction of the working class and their mobility needs have amplified automobile dependency in the valley where private operators dominate the public transport sector with a capricious service. Situation worsened further when the futile political leadership (elected and autocratic) with vested interest led to not only collapse of the popular and profit-making state run public transport system but also promoted imports of gas guzzling giants by providing tax breaks to the political and bureaucratic elites. It is hard to believe that bulging issue of the public transport is yet to become a priority at the policy level and any sustainable intervention, if any, must therefore be instigated by the community. Nevertheless, it’s much easier said than done as community members that are fortunate enough not to own automobiles often (mis)perceive that automobile dependency provides them with increased mobility independence and save time/money compared to the usage of public transport. How valid is such perception? A simple cost and benefit analysis on automobile dependency of a reputed travel agency director (who owns an entry level compact car with a market price of 1.5 million) certainly reveals otherwise! Director spends several hours a week in unproductive traffic jams and estimates annual automobile operating cost for his personal usage (fuel, driver, insurance, state tax, minor maintenance, parking fees and so on) to be at least 180,000. In a country where average citizen earn less than US $ 240/year, annual operating cost of US $ 2,400 for an automobile worth US $ 20,000 is simply outrageous .
From a business perspective, cost of automobile dependency for director must translate into everyday benefits of more than 500 rupees/day simply to break-even. Thus, director agrees that automobile dependency has become a socioeconomic reverence for him rather than the actual need. Well, even from a sustainability perspective, rising fuel cost, environmental/health cost and an opportunity cost associated with the hefty upfront investment certainly outweighs the benefits for majority of working class community who want to fulfill their mobility needs using an automobile. So, what are the pragmatic alternatives for a community?
- Aware those who spend hours in traffic jam as well as thousands on the fact that using public transport has additional economic, environmental and social advantages compared to the automobile dependency.
- Initiate dialogue with transport operators to maintain timetable and routes that link community (ward or cluster of wards) with major hubs and promote periodic dissemination of such information through accessible medium (newspaper, radio, TV or internet).
- Find ways to finance much awaited ‘walkways’ and ‘cycle lanes’ in close collaboration with the planning officials/donor agencies as major economic hubs in valley are within a walking or cycling reach.
- Apply appropriate economic instruments at the community level to discourage automobile usage by a) imposing toll charges during the peak hours as there are no incentives for not driving automobiles, and b) developing a mechanism to flow-back portion of such charges to the community so that collected funds can be invested in walkways or cycle lanes.
In order to reduce if not reverse the growing trend of automobile dependency for a sustainable Kathmandu , community with a collective voice must therefore take an eminent role in transforming on-hand transport services into efficient/effective means of commuting as well as adopting sustainable alternatives when possible!
(Author is a PhD candidate at Institute of Sustainability and Technology Policy, Murdoch University - Australia and can be contacted at subasdhakal@gmail.com)
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