More Thoughts on Mass Transit

I was speaking with an engineer turned social activist last weekend and he said something that really stuck with me. He was talking about the different between a street and a road. He said it’s comparable to the concept of a house and a home. A house is just a structure, concrete and pieces of material, a utility, just like a road. But a home is cluttered, it’s messy, it’s vibrant and lived in and chaotic and interesting, just like a street. The streets in Bangalore, and indeed all over India and the world, seem to be dying. It used to be that life happened on streets. Hawkers and merchants and beggars and pedestrians and children playing cricket and old men meeting on the corners for chai and paan and women chatting as they bought vegetables and teenagers goofing off while they ate chaats. Streets were alive and messy and full of people living their lives and making connections and adding a tangibility and closeness that doesn’t seem to be here as much anymore.

I keep hearing stories about ‘how it used to be’ and how you didn’t have to fear for your life crossing a road or worry about your kids getting hit by a car if they played outside. Now there’s been a mass movement towards a sort of sterilization, a widening and conversion of streets to roads as the city has gradually come to be overtaken by vehicles. Land, vast tracks of public and private land, and trees and greenery and sidewalks, are being sacrificed to this monumental, all-powerful movement of the Private Vehicle; the purchasing of personal space no matter what the cost. If you can afford a car or a two wheeler or even a taxi or a rickshaw you have made it, man, You are up there with the cream of society, taking your private vehicle and dominating those roadways. You don’t have to walk or take one of these slower forms of transportation, you don’t have to make any effort at all. You just sit back with your space and your AC and cruise along. Only now, everyone wants one and what’s more, they have one. So you might have your personal space and your status symbol, but you’re stuck in traffic for twice as long as it would have taken you to walk where you wanted to go and back again!

The argument for private vehicles is the convenience of this door-to-door transport that we have all become accustomed to. The ease and amazement of the least amount of effort we can manage. We want the flexibility, luxury and leisure of being able to go where we want when we want no matter the wider costs and implications. Public transportation systems are just too inadequate. They’re too slow, or too unreliable, or too crowded or too infrequent. So we get our own ride and complain when everyone else does the same and we all have to sit in traffic together for hours on end, burning fossil fuel, inhaling smoke and destroying our environment.

Don’t get me wrong, I have a car and there’s nothing I love more than cruising at a clear 65 down the highway and getting exactly where I need to go without and muss or fuss. But I like the buses too. Especially in Seattle. You can get wherever you need to go in a pretty timely manner. There are stops every few blocks all over the city and a fairly reliable and affordable route system to help me get where I need to go in about the same amount of time (and sans the parking prices) as if I took my car. So if more transit systems were like this, and they became even more efficient, and more people took them, then roads wouldn’t have to be widened, trees wouldn’t have to be cut, people wouldn’t have to spend so much money on cars and insurance and gas, less green house gases would be released, the routes and wotnot would probably get even better, more funding could be allocated to other projects (like, oh I don’t know, education? Health care? Etc!) and maybe people would be so unhealthy and have to spend half their lives in traffic. They might even be able to spend more time with their family, and friends, and who knows, maybe even be happier and then violence would decrease and maybe, just maybe, the world would not be quite so fucked up. Maybe.

But mass transit has to be done right for this to happen. That means consulting with the public before you build the public transportation that’s supposed to serve them. Considering routes and infrastructure projects that will cause the least amount of disruption. Trying not to displace people from their homes and destroy their businesses. Preserve street spaces and try to keep in tact the integrity of a city rather than breaking it down to look just like the ‘global cities’ of Singapore and Hong Kong. We already have a Singapore and a Hong Kong, so how about we try to keep a Bangalore!!! It is so devastating to see something that could potentially be so good (the Metro and MRTS here) go so bad (i.e. – with mass displacement, loss of business, lack of compensation, and severe environmental degradation and disruption of the city). There has to be a way to compromise, right? The Metro people I’ve been speaking to keep talking about how this project will be for the ‘greater good’ and how ‘sacrifices must be made’ – but at what cost? And more importantly, at whose cost? The greater good doesn’t seem to really be benefiting the greater population, but rather a particular category of people. It kind of makes you wonder, just whose city is this anyways? From the looks of this project, it’s not the hawkers, or the bamboo weavers, or the slum dwellers, or the beggars, or the small shop owners, or the pedestrians, or the home owners and business owners along the Metro route or who happen to be in locations where road widening is taking place. Public transportation should serve the public, right? The whole public, not just the part that looks good to foreigners and investors.

I’m all for progress and everything, and I understand that change is inevitable and you can’t hold onto the past and life isn’t fair and sacrifices must be made and blah blah blah. But is it too much to ask as a 21 year old college kid who still has hope for the future and hasn’t had the optimism beaten out of her by life yet, that we, I, us, everyone just try to do something better than has been done before? To learn from the past and try and try and try to make something better of the future? To be conscious and compassionate and to believe that there is really a better way for the world to work and people to live in it and that it’s not all just about money and power and status but that maybe, maybe it’s about people and friendship and sustainability and that maybe the ‘greater good’ can actually be good for a greater number of people?

Maybe not. And maybe I am just a naïve 21 year old college student who doesn’t know anything about anything and is about to get a cold hard slap of reality when I find out what the ‘real world’ is really like. But for now I would like to believe that maybe my generation and the generations that follow can save the way this world could work and not beat each other into the ground, thank you very much. Maybe not. But then again, maybe so.