Band 5+: Car ownership has increased so rapidly over the past thirty years that in many cities, which caused constant traffic jams. Why is this happening? What measures can governments take to discourage people from owning cars?

Nowadays, the number people having cars has significantly increased over the past three decades that results in long, never-ending traffic queues. Personally, I agree with the statement of increased numbers of cars in roads and traffic caused by them and governments can motivate people to use other transportations to reduce traffics jams.

As cities are growing and developing, owning a car becomes a need for majority of poeple rather than being their simple dream. People may use cars for variety of reasons, such as, dropping their kids to school, driving to their work or even traveling a long distance to see their relatives, for business purposes and so on. Even though, there are other transports available to complete their duties, using their personal cars seems easier and more comfortable to them. This popular phenomenon leads to the excessive numbers of cars on road and unwanted traffic jams. For example, many of the people in Azerbaijan leave their work at 6.00 pm and this is accepted as a rush hour that they spend hours to get back their homes.

To preclude the disturbing matter, governments should take steps to decrease the number to accepted level before it becomes impossible to mitigate. The main solution can be encouraging people to use other transports, such as buses and bicycles. Increased usage of buses is logical, because it carries more and more people than a single car and in many countries there are specific bus roads. In addition to this, there is an increased trend among people to to use bicycles because they are cheaper and more fast and people do not have to spend hours in traffic. Governments should allocate their budgets according to this problem, dedicating more on construction of roads and purchasing of buses and bikes. For instance, in Amsterdam plethora of people use bicycles and as a result, there is a barely traffic jams in this city.

To sum up, increased number of people owning a car is a problem for most of the countries and regulatory bodies should be able to tackle this situation by proper allocation of resources.