Thursday, 4 April 2013

A modest proposal for solving Indian traffic congestion

It is easy to spot, many towns and cities in India are hopelessly clogged with slow moving traffic. This is intolerable as the long journey times and unbreathable polluted air seriously detract from the otherwise ideal life. There have been many attempts to resolve this problem; through public transport systems, bypasses and road widening. Unfortunately none of the attempts has touched the real issue, the behaviour of Indian drivers and the volume of traffic. Something needs to be done to improve traffic flow and efficiency.
It strikes me that one of the fundamental limits to Indian traffic flow is the volume of horn of a vehicle. When faced with an obstacle or continuous queue of traffic, a driver simply uses the horn to accelerate the passage of vehicles ahead. It strikes me that if this is the case, a louder horn must produce a greater effect. Simply increasing the power of car horns is a great untapped potential. As current sound levels are far below that which is lethal to listeners at 1m distance it is only reasonable that the government should set minimum dB levels for new products.
There is also the issue of traffic management. Very busy roads are often patrolled by policemen, who can only whistle repeatedly and non-specifically at the traffic. This coded instruction to move faster against the impossible is however severely limited. A policeman after all has to breathe between blasts on the whistle. Instead I propose equipping these essential agents with an automatic whistle, allowing continuous sound production and improving traffic flow by anything up to 40%. This rich vein of improvements could extend still further, with multiple auto whistles used by a single highly trained officer.
In the end it must be accepted that certain obstructions are not road vehicles and do not belong in the road; such as cows, goats, dogs, pedestrians, sleeping people, street stands, hand carts and building material stores. This is primarily due to their lack of a horn, which is a shocking oversight. Fitting the cows with bells, at a small cost, could significantly reduce their impact on passing vehicles. At the same time street sellers wheeling their carts in the road should be compelled by law to yell "ahoy ahoy ahoy". Pedestrians walking in the road too could use this same tactic, but to avoid fatigue a megaphone may be a fashionable street accessory.
Some pedestrians may naturally be tempted to ignore this law, as unlike previous laws in India it is not certain that everyone will follow obediently. This can be solved by writing lots of signs telling pedestrians to "follow all road laws". These signs could conveniently be placed on the street stands which block the pavements, so as to be visible just at the right time. It's time the government of India recognised that every Indian is special, and laws are meant for other people and not them. When each driver is just blocking the road for a moment, for example to unload a dozen passengers with luggage or so, automatically engaging horns should be government issue.
With these small changes, India may just manage to avoid traffic jams in its future.

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