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It should be clear to all that flyovers don't solve urban traffic problems. They make them worse by taking away scarce funding from solutions that could, notes Subir Roy.
As the Pujas approached the citizens of Kolkata could sense the feel-good factor well up within themselves.
They would be getting a great Puja gift: Their longest flyover, from the Parama circle on the Eastern Bypass to the Park Circus crossing, a full 9.2 km in its final avatar.
When entirely completed in a year's time, you would be able to drive from the airport to the poshest neighbourhood in town, Alipore, virtually from one flyover to another, without your feet seriously touching dirty earth.
This will be in a city known around the world as one of the dirtiest, poorest and most congested.
Most of its citizens, who will not be able to afford to get on to the flyover (why will become clear presently) will nevertheless presumably feel better off just by seeing cars zooming above them.
Thereby, a city and state fed for decades on a Left-inspired mindset of envy will have completely turned around.
The flyover has been long in coming. Conceived in 2003, work finally got going in 2010.
After many stoppages and roadblocks - mainly because politically well-connected squatters refused to make way - and after pushes and nudges from the high court, most of the work is over and the main stretch, except for a flank of less than a kilometre, has just been thrown open.
A heavenly feeling should now be pervading the city, over and above that created by all the colourful Puja pandals and the prospects of virtually ten days of public holiday.
Almost everyone has been waiting for this day when the massive traffic jams along the Park Circus connector, the main artery through which to enter the city, will be gone.
But something unbelievable has happened. There were massive jams from day one on the new flyover itself, far bigger than those that plagued the connector before the flyover came.
It has become a promoter, rather than a terminator, of traffic jams!
The city's traffic police were thrown into a tizzy and started experimenting.
First they made the flyover one-way and the underlying connector road one-way in the other direction.
Eventually they hit upon what seems to be working - making the flyover one-way, towards the inner city, during the morning office hours and one-way in the opposite direction (towards the suburbs) during the evening.
So has this been worth it? The final bill for the flyover, originally estimated at Rs 330 crore (Rs 3.3 billion), will be much more with all the project delays.
What seems unbelievable and unforgivable is that absolutely nothing, other than cars and motorbikes, are allowed on it - no buses, no bicycles and of course none of that absolute unmentionable, pedestrians.
This must leave out well over 95 per cent of those who live in the city.
When the final flank is ready and the airport-Alipore dream run will become possible, traffic jams along the route will likely go away, if at all, only for a brief period, to return soon in full force, just like before the flyover came.
Right now the flyover along the old Lower Circular Road from Park Circus to Alipore is sparsely filled by speeding automobiles, while the old road underneath is choked with dense traffic.
It should be clear to all that flyovers don't solve urban traffic problems. They make them worse by taking away scarce funding from solutions that could.
You can flood a city with low-polluting, CNG-run, comfortable low-floor buses which can be fitted with GPS sensors to track and ensure that they stick to timing and route.
The service can be delivered at capital costs comparable to building flyovers which most can't use. Proof of concept lies in the Uber and Ola taxi services.
And once a regular, comfortable bus service becomes available, people will bring out fewer cars. A city car tax can push the process forward.
As early as 40 years ago, perceptive Americans were realising that their love affair with cars and suburban commutes via expressways was all wrong.
We in India are yet to catch on. Gore Vidal, the celebrated American essayist, made the point in a 1974 essay What Robert Moses did to New York City. "…after the Second World War he (Moses) built more than $2 billion worth of roads within the city. To do this, he expropriated thousands of buildings, not all of them slums, and evicted tens of thousands of people….Moses's elevated highways shadowed and blighted neighbourhoods. The inner city began to rot, die."
In Moses's Dream, "there would be no buses or trains on his expressways - just more and more highways for more and cars, creating more and more traffic jams…"
Vidal quotes Moses, in 1974 when the first Opec oil price hike had just struck, as saying, "'We live in a motorised civilisation.' Energy crisis, unlivable cities, pollution - none of these things had altered his (Moses's) proud Dream."
Moses's dream lives on in Kolkata.
