FREEWAYFOLLIES

The formal announcement of the new 16 lane freeway proposed to slice through the city of Gurgaon aroused serious concerns with many of its residents. 60mins to 6mins is the USP for the freeway connecting two parts of the city which already has a wide enough road to deal with peak time traffic. While many worried about pedestrian access, cyclist routes, etc … some worried about the awkward disconnections that deepen as the city is fragmented further.

Freeways by definition are controlled-access highways designed exclusively for unhindered high speed vehicular traffic with no signals, at-grade crossings or property accesses. All pedestrian/vehicular crossovers are either over or under passes.

The predatory nature of freeways is manifested in a spatially and socially fragmented city. They do not connect with their sheer size and speed, they divide. They reject the very city they mean to bind because they knowingly relegate the quality of human life thriving in the neighbourhoods: they displace, divide and re-define.

We never learn, do we? There are innumerable instances of terrible things freeways have done to their cities and there are ample ‘been there, done it’ cities who have burnt their fingers only to reverse their own acts. The early 20^th century built freeways to counter rapid increase in traffic volumes and to reduce travel time. The fallouts in the past few decades led to widespread public opposition. Proposals were abandoned, significantly scaled back and freeway removal policies were adopted to rip off and reclaim taken spaces in the city. These cities gained both economic and environment revival and have become models for alternative planning thereafter.

Again, freeways are often self-defeating and they inevitably trigger what is called 'induced demand.' The phenomenon is consistent with the economic theory of supply and demand and is often used as an argument against freeways. They are known to generate more traffic over the years as the number of cars and trips go up and in turn clog the same freeway which was brought in to reduce travel time!

That is not all, various other negative externalities compound the same problem. Freeways bring change in land-use distribution patterns – urban sprawl which is directly proportional to higher energy consumption. They are seen to lower abutting property values because of their spatial disconnect topped with air and noise pollution which besides leading to urban blight, has been shown to cause autism in children. An increase in accident fatality rates comes built-in, as does an unaesthetic and inhospitable cityscape with crisscrossing tarred scars, cutting the city's fabric into smaller enclosed pockets of isolated land parcels.

Neighbourhoods remain detached even after bridging them with under and over passes, especially impoverished ones where residents are less likely to own cars or alter ways to improve their quality of life. Over-passes even with escalators are not popular pedestrian preferences over under-passes but the latter are dungeons by night fall unless they have physical/electronic surveillance. Finance limits the number of these passes and leave huge walking distances between them. Walking or cycling past zipping cars on one side and high boundary walls with thick tree buffered development (to cut noise and air pollution) on the other, can't be a pleasant experience by any standards. It can only be boring and yet more boring.

Pro-development governance with its vested interest has supported the freeway without considering local interests. Citizens need to question the very need of a freeway running through Gurgaon. It only adds value to a group of car users and in no way guarantees public convenience or mass utility. Effective traffic intersection engineering and management at the local level coupled with city level traffic planning should counter congestion issues of Gurgaon on the given route. Authorities should invest in building mass transit modes and attempt to implement smart growth policies which support transit-oriented mixed use development, walkable, cycle-friendly neighbourhoods, and encourage mass transit ridership.

Maybe years from now we will tear down these freeways and replace them with parks and boulevards, streets and squares, which truly connect and bind communities together, which make attractive, engaging and memorable public realm, which is pro-people. But must we learn the hard way in a resource-poor and congested country?

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RwiteeMandal is a practicing architect and urban designer. She is also a visiting faculty at the Post Graduate Urban Design Programme at her alma mater, School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. Rwitee can be contacted at rwitee.mandal@gmail.com

Why technology can whisper humanity in politics

The Romans had it right.

On the triumphant chariots, bedecked with triumphant generals or emperors and their laurel wreath, they put a slave shadowing the victor, whispering amid the confetti showers, memento mori, roughly translated you are only a man. It was not a new idea to show a man his proper place. The Greeks had a name for the disease of hubris, pleonexia, or the craving for more than one's share.

The Guardian has referred to pleonexia while talking about Joseph Stiglitz's new book The Price of Inequality which talks about the defining theme of our disturbed times - why so few gain at the expense of so many?

Pleonexia could be a unique trait of the average Indian politician - the desire to gain much more than your share, often at the expense of others.

Why does this happen and why do people get away with it? We believe in India especially it happens because we have a functional democracy but not an experienced democracy.

The difference is simple: India is a democracy, every five years we vote in whoever we want (at least among the pool contesting) but otherwise our connect with democracy, our sense of daily democracy is missing. This means we rarely know our representative, the one we ostensibly knowingly select or elect, and have little or no interaction with the decision-making that happens on our behalf.

Power in India has always been applied by grandeur and fuelled by pleonexia. It comes from hundreds of years of invasion and rule through which the rulers, always a tiny set, could reign over vast millions by impressing an everlasting stamp of superiority and distance. It is a legacy we carry from Mughal and British rule and it has continued mostly unchallenged till now.

For the first time in India's independent history, there is a palpable sense that the gap between those who govern in the name of the people, and the people themselves, is thinning.

Why is this happening? There are multiple reasons from rapid urbanisation which brings people closer to pedestals of power and thereby takes away the mystique; the spread of education breaks the infallible myth; mushrooming media shows demolishes powerful people in our living rooms and bedrooms every night and technology brings not just people but also people in power closer and makes them human.
 

It is fashionable in some circles to laugh at media, and social media, as naiveté of the political imbecile. Ask many an Indian politician today and they will still tell you that elections are won and lost on money, caste and shenanigans, and on little else. That is true - in many cases. But in many more, the tide is turning and anger of the Indian politician, the private bitter and abusive jokes about the media (sometimes well deserved) come from a sense of insecurity that the politician in this country has never felt before.

We believe that one of the greatest boons of much abused technology is that it gives an instantaneous voice to millions - and immediately millions say nonsense - but with time, from the white noise, comes real, steadfast critique which incrementally changes the system.

We believe that the power of technology is not immediate revolution but a relentless barrage that wears, and ultimately, tears off an unjust system.

Technology is not the instant power of an army raised by Subhash Chandra Bose but the wearing effect of Gandhian satyagraha, every drop, every tweet, every post, every phone call, every email, every SMS attacks the unjust and refuses to let them sleep, until, tired and weary, they give up.

Think of a system where every allocation to a bed in a government hospital can be tracked real time - who is it going to, what is the need - is all in one hub that can be accessed at any time. Too big you think? But why? Do we not live in a world where one website caters to the relentless mutterings of reportedly 900 million registered users everyday (Facebook)?
Think of a system where the admission to every government school is online and on the cloud and can be accessed from anywhere, any time. You know who was admitted, from where, how and why.

Think of attendance records of students - and, most critically, teachers - of every government school placed online and on the cloud to be accessed any time, anywhere.

That's why at Whypoll we are staring with the small things - a platform to complain harassment, an app to reach out to friends and family, a system to ask questions of our MPs and MLAs. Every long journey begins with a question.

At Whypoll, we start at the start, at the why.

So when you dream of change, dream with us of a world where change happens in countless ways everyday, at every moment, and leave the age of the guillotine behind. Because technology today can help you whisper in powerful ears - oh, but you too are only human.

Hindol Sengupta is one of the two founding trustees of the not-for-profit Whypoll Trust, India's only open government platform. Whypoll works to create technological interfaces between the citizen and government. He is the author of The Liberals, on living through twenty years of Indian economic liberalisation, out by Harper Collins in August, 2012.