27 June 2011. A more common feature these days in Kabul is that of numerous drivers and passengers sitting in the vehicles waiting desperately to move on- If only there were no long queues and massive delays!
Whether it is a small incident on the road or a big VIP movement, more often or not the outcome seems to be the same- Kabul coming to a grinding halt!
Various, but reliable, sources have set out that the current population of Kabul (area 300 sq km) is somewhere between 3-4 million and the same is growing at an alarming annual growth rate of 5%- some even expect the city population to get double soon. On the other hand, there has been a massive surge in number of vehicles since the fall of Taliban in 2002 i.e. the vehicles in the city have grown by five times (circa from 100,000 to half a million). The situation is going from bad to worse as the vehicle growth is further assumed to increase at a princely 10% per annum for the next ten years!
At the time when the big thing happening in the country is “Transition” (Kabul is one of the seven chosen areas for transition), I wonder if someone is also looking at the state of affairs in the country’s capital city- gateway of the country!
To put things in some context, the current speeds in this 5,000 years old city is more or less same as what there would have been 5,000 years back i.e. vehicles these days are merely able to attain journey speeds that people once would have been travelling in Kabul either by foot or by animal carts!
I think gone are the days when experts felt that traffic behaves like a liquid form. These days it has certainly taken the shape of gaseous form, more so in an urban environment. Wherever the users find some space they want to plug the gap in and the consequences are right in front of everybody.
Apart from the long delays, air pollution is another big issue that seems to be gripping Kabul. It is at record levels high causing anxiety and concerns among the people living in the city. Even though the government has recently taken an initiative of closing all the civic offices in the city on Thursdays but the same was never complemented with any other measure to address the issue of congestion and pollution in Kabul. If only one can look and start applying the principles of urban transport planning here!
I was intrigued to write this piece because for the last few months I am seeing that Kabul is invariably covered with dust and it has started taking me atleast three quarters of an hour for a usual five-ten minutes journey. Last year I (potentially others too) suffered one of the biggest delays of my life. A normal travel journey (on 28th August 2010) of 15 minutes (2-3 km) took a massive four and half hours to complete- until today, no one in the city could explain the reason for that gridlock! See underneath some of the moments I had captured then to treasure!
NB: This article was written when I was stuck “again” in traffic in Kabul on 27th June 2011.
