Comment

So the Maharashtra government is mulling over a congestion tax to “discourage vehicle owners from bringing their cars on to busy roads.” Apparently this is serious mulling : the Chief Minister himself is involved as is the Secretary (Special Projects). Consultants have been appointed; the very same consultants who introduced the Congestion Tax for Central London in 2003.

The very basic and fundamental mistake is to borrow an idea which works somewhere and try and transpose it somewhere else. That’s flawed simply because ‘Somewhere’ is very, very different from ‘Somewhere Else’:London is vast and spread out while Mumbai is a narrow strip of land.

This difference in their physical shape means that there’s a difference in the traffic pattern to start with. How can you apply the prescription for one to the other?

Even more important is the observation which has stared us all in the face for years:the problems for the automobile on the road are not caused by the road but by the automobile itself.

However much you build and expand your infrastructure, it will always be inadequate because it can never keep up with the expansion in the numbers of cars.

So, in the long run, you have no option but to discourage the use of vehicles. Obviously, you can’t do that unless you offer motorists an alternative.

It makes eminent sensefor London to discourage cars because it has excellent underground and bus services. Does Mumbai have this? If this city had a system even half as good as London’s, you can be sure that a majority of car users would jettison their vehicles and the painfully long and stressful drives they have to endure.

What we need to do is quickly upgrade our suburban train and bus services. Has that been done, except on a piece-meal basis over the years?

In fact, what has been done is the exact opposite: lots and lots of flyovers have been constructed and miles of cemented roads, both of which encourage the motorist.

To come are the Bandra-Worli Sea link, the Peddar Road flyover etc., all of which too encourage the motorist. So after givingthe car driver one carrot after another over so many years, the government now wants to beat him with the stick of the Congestion Tax!

Besides the illogic of all this, can you imagine the chaos that will ensue if every vehicle has to stop at each flyover to pay a toll? An electronic tax collection system of the kind London has cannot be implemented overnight; until that’s done, we will have so many hold-ups that you are likely to see road rage of the most violent kind.

What we really need to do is use existing roads optimally. To give one example, the Joint Commissioner of MMRDA wrote to the traffic police a week ago to say that although they had widened as many as twenty roads in the city, including several arterialroads, they had already been encroached upon by garages, shops, hawkers and trucksfor parking.

This wouldn’t happen if there were constant monitoring by the authorities and a zero tolerance policy to ensure that roads are used only as roads.

To get optimum utilisation of roads, you also need to get parked cars off them. Which means putting up underground/multi-storey parking facilities. Instead of that we have whimsical ideas like halving the parking at Fountain to put in a memorial garden!

Ask any motorist and he will say that the best days for driving are when there is a taxi strike. Taxis park, get washed and repaired and wait for passengers, all on the road.

This problem is aggravated because we have four times the number of vehicles for hire than we actually need. Which means that a majority of them are idle most of the time and stay parked on the roads. Reduce the number of taxis and rickshaws even by half and you will see the difference.

These are tough decisions to take, and a zero tolerance policy is hard to implement. But emergencies need emergency measures. They certainly don’t need hare-brained ideas like the Congestion Tax.