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C. Gopinath

A frequent complaint of a motorist inching along the roads of India’s metros is about how bad the traffic is. When you consider that thousands of new vehicles are being registered on a daily basis, the future looks rather bleak. Already statistics of rising road accidents make venturing out a daunting task.

The buyer of a vehicle is not looking forward to a pleasant driving experience, whatever else is his motivation to own a vehicle. Pity the drivers of the public transport vehicles who have to deal with the chaos for a full shift every day!

Most of the blame for the traffic is heaped on ‘infrastructure’, the current bogeyman for all things wrong. The common complaint is that there are not enough roads, they are not wide enough, they are in bad shape, and so on. Therefore, the response from the government has also been to deal with this infrastructural bottleneck.

As roads are widened, and flyovers and subways built, the traffic seems better for a while and then bottlenecks seem to appear again soon, as you would have noticed on the new eight-lane highway out of Delhi towards Gurgaon.

Organisational analysis provides us some insight into why this is so. The two pillars of a smoothly functioning organisation are structural and behavioural factors. The structural aspects of an organisation include the division of the work into departments, delineating responsibilities, specifying reporting relationships, and levels of authority, and so on.

The behavioural factors include the culture of the organisation, the sense of loyalty and cooperation that exists, motivational and leadership issues, and so on. If the focus is on one and not the other, the organisation only limps along, obstructed by inefficiencies. Structural problems need to be dealt with a structural solution while behavioral problems need a behavioral response. Using one to deal with the other can only provide a temporary respite and not a solution. For example, if two managers who need to coordinate their efforts do not do so because they dislike each other, the boss only setting up a coordination meeting (structural) will be ineffective as the two will find ways to sabotage each other. A behavioral response is needed.

Again, in a highly competitive market, if the sales department complains that it cannot meet targets because the shipping department is not cooperating with timely shipments of stock, asking the two managers to work better together will not help if the shipping department’s budget requires it to wait till it has full container loads before shipping. A structural response is needed.

A similar lens can prove handy to look at how traffic management has been approached by civic authorities. We see plenty of structural responses and the feeble attempts to use a structural solution to meet behavioral problems. Understandable, because it is easier to put barricades than educate people.

Let us look at some examples. Since traffic does not respect the centre-dividing line, and uses flashing headlights as asserting a right to cross over in the face of oncoming traffic, medians are constructed to keep traffic on its side, boxing them up. If there is the additional problem of random crossings of pedestrians all along the road or two-wheelers that cross the median, the height of the dividers are raised to make it difficult to climb over.

Setting up requisite pedestrian crossings and then training the people to use them is too difficult. So we see people still crossing at all points, climbing over barricades, or driving on the wrong side of the road till they come to a break in the divider and then cross over. We then bemoan the resulting interruption to traffic flow and the rising accidents.

If the traffic moves too fast along the road, the knee-jerk response is the ubiquitous speed bump. Oddly enough, they are put on the main road near intersections with smaller roads, rather than the other way around. Because drivers from a side road do not wait to join the traffic along the main road, or people do not respect speed limits (behavioural problems), every one on the main road is penalised with speed bumps (structural solutions).

Making roads one way is the new fad. Many roads in congested areas have been made one-way, a road-broadening exercise without effort. Where this is done because the road does not allow for widening, it is inevitable. But where this is not so, we see traffic from a two-lane road suddenly move into a four lane one-way road before facing a two-lane road again.

The net result is that the drivers, not trained to adhere to lanes, take advantage of the brief wide road to treat it like a scramble for pole-position on a race track, causing a jam again as the traffic converges! Moreover, excessive use of one-ways results in people staying longer on the road, with its attendant problems of delays and pollution.

Some structural solutions are imperative. Roads need to be broadened, where they can be. If there is too much traffic in all directions at a busy intersection, leading to delays, there needs to be a flyover or a subway.

If street-side temples, flower and fruit sellers occupy the pavements making pedestrians use the road, squeezing the space for vehicles, the squatters need to be cleared and the pavements made free for pedestrian use. But there is more to traffic management than putting up a temporary barricade in the middle of the road warning the driving public ‘Accident prone zone’ (as the Chennai police have taken to doing), or putting up a speed bump to slow things down. Often, these only worsen a bad situation.

The big gap in our response to traffic management is ignoring behavioral issues. We need to recognize that knowing how to drive a vehicle is not the same as being aware of how to drive on a road. Rotary clubs or other well-meaning associations putting up stern signs that read ‘Follow lane discipline’ do not work if the people do not know what lane discipline means and how not following it endangers everyone’s safety.

What is to be done? Coordinated education/training (combined, of course, with attentive policing) is needed. Who is to initiate the response? The obvious answer is that there are enough rules and regulations in place, and testing procedures for grant of driving licence should deal with this if it is only enforced properly. But relying on this has not worked.

We also cannot afford to wait for the government to find a solution to the problem. (Also, decision-makers who sit in cars with flashing lights and jeeps to clear their paths have other priorities to attend to.) There is a great need for private initiatives to plug the gaps.

Moreover, it is not just the vehicle operators but also the average citizens — cyclists and pedestrians — who have a role to play in traffic management.

The recent case in end-August of a four-year old in Shimla who lost his life because the Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) followers blocked traffic with their processions preventing his parents’ efforts to get him to the hospital, is a stark reminder of how far ignoring traffic management can impact our lives.

One does not know how many lives have already been lost due to chaotic traffic preventing fire engines and ambulances from reaching their destinations.

The automotive and insurance companies are interested parties in this issue. The former needs to ensure that conditions prevail for continued sales of their products, and the latter needs to reduce the uncertainties and risk that impact their pricing policies. At least these two groups should take the initiative to fund a major road behaviour education programme.

Creatively designed public service announcements on television, training of driving instructors, drivers of vehicle fleets, and police personnel about correct and incorrect forms of road behavior, classes in educational institutions, and so on are all required if we are to make an impact. It must also be a long-term campaign, not a one-week celebration of traffic safety with ribbon cutting.

We need to fix the behavioural issues to get some breathing time before more severe structural solutions are considered such as congestion tariffs now in force in London, or the vehicle quota system in Singapore.

The irony of the traffic problem in most cities in India is that we do not make use of the available road space efficiently but are content complaining.

A structural solution such as putting up a fly-over takes about 18 months. Even a consistent and intensive education campaign over that period of time will begin to show results. We need to make a start urgently.

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