Ordinary citizens should ponder since we are the one who keep talking about better roads - which quickly translate in our mind into wider roads, faster moving traffic, etc. Traffic police also support these since they quickly assume their headache of congestion and slow moving traffic can be solved by wider roads, etc. Only in an underdeveloped country - as far as these issues are concerned - do we build highways in the middle of the city, explicitly for ensuring faster moving traffic. Right in the middle of dense parts of the city. Or build a highway - with pretty much no access controls - and no land use controls to prevent its both sides from becoming urban. Either way you end up with a highway/expressway right in the middle of commercial/residential and dense areas. But here is the kicker. The same above mentioned Traffic Police places all kinds of barricades - in a zig zag manner - to explicitly prevent vehicles from traveling fast. Uhhh? you may say. By the way, these barricades come up at parts of the highway where people have killed and maimed each other using vehicles. The fast moving vehicles mentioned above. How does the Traffic Police know this? They have data now a days of where the accidents are happening. Imprecise data. But data none the less. They can tell you what time of the day, what type of citizen is getting killed at what location. But we still want cars to move fast in the middle of the city. Like I have posted many times before. In public policy, etc. like in Computer Science, garbage in, garbage out. You ask the wrong question, you get the wrong answer.
Posted on: Wed, 22 Jan 2014 12:18:39 +0000
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