Andheri to Powai.

Andheri to Powai.

Well, I got it right again!

In my previous article (JVLR & Singur) I had indicated what has now become very clear after the BEST strike. The BEST has a fleet of about 3500 buses which carry lakhs of passengers everyday. Now let us do some simple mathematics here.

The density of passengers is most in certain routes and directions and depends on time. Generally commuters go to the city in the morning and return back to their homes in the suburbs in the evening. If we assume that 2000 buses carry almost 70 passengers per trip, it translates into 1,40,000 passengers depending on BEST buses at any given instant during the peak hours. A reasonable estimate should be that almost 30 lakh commuters depend on the BEST daily.

Now imagine that the 3000 buses are replaced by auto-rickshaws, vans, taxis and cars to transport 30 lakh commuters. In such a situation, roads, arterial or otherwise, will be clogged and that there will be a steep increase in the occurrences of a phenomenon called as traffic jam is obvious.

This is what happened with me and this is what I observed. I left Andheri station (E) at 9:15 in a bus that was to go till Saki Naka. It took the bus 10 minutes to cover a distance of 100 metres and I reached Saki Naka, which is no more than 5 kilometres from Andheri (E), 45 minutes later. I saw a similar scene at the carrom-board smooth roads of Hiranandani Gardens where chauffeurs and drivers were honking their cars in synchrony. The traffic updates on the radio channels were longer than usual. Taxis, autos and private buses, which on any other day would have been parked in an unknown corner near stations, malls and other landmarks, were clogging the roads and an aerial view of this great place called as Mumbai would have looked like the smoke and soot filled bronchi of the lungs of a chain smoker.

During the journey, I pointed to a plump man drenched in sweat about the space the cars and other private vehicles were occupying and their contribution as a major factor responsible for this congestion. He replied “Just because we can’t own cars does not mean that those who can should also not own cars? If I had had the money, I wouldn’t have been here in this bus. He was right when he said that he and majority were getting squeezed in trains and buses not by choice, but out of compulsion. This should not make us ignore the fact that in a city like Mumbai (which has the lowest ratio of open spaces to people and where thousands of people live per sq. km) most people do not have the legitimacy or the moral right to possess a car. This point has been discussed in my previous article. I would like to ask some questions to those who own a car and see nothing wrong in it and by doing so I would like to put forward my clinching argument.

When you cannot make a small sacrifice, how on Earth can you expect shop owners to compromise on their means of livelihood so that flyovers and widened roads for you be built?
Why should you expect the United States to stop polluting or become a signatory to the Kyoto protocol when you are no better than them?

If you think might is right, then you are not the mightiest!

The BEST strike has indicated that there is no guarantee that flyovers and widened roads will not be a stop-gap or temporary arrangement. There is every likelihood that the flyovers being built today may prove to be inadequate tomorrow. Give it a thought if you want to change the way you travel and see a cleaner and greener Mumbai.

Time to say good-bye! See you next time.

V Sreenivasan