Every major city in the world today faces the conundrum of roads congested with traffic. This issue not only increases travel times but also leads to dangerous vehicle emissions to cluster locally in those areas. In this essay, we will discuss what are its leading causes and how they can be effectively tackled.
Todays ever growing world has forced the common man to keep moving towards the urban city centres in search for employment, better quality of life, and closer access to education and community services. This very trend has lead to a rise of population dense areas which are the leading factor for the congestion of traffic or people alike. The answer to this lies in replanning urban infrastructure and spreading it out more evenly across a district or province while sustaining the employment and service ecosystem into the newly formed communities. This will encourage people to move out and alleviate the regular traffic across the city centres with less people having to travel there.
Going ahead, we see a spike in the number of individuals of legal age having a personal automobiles in the past decade which in turn is also a leading cause for the issue in question. What happens is that when there are only 1 or 2 individuals travelling in a vehicle, with a capacity of 4 on the average, the effective number of vehicles on the road increase. A car pooling policy has been known to be effective in China, where vehicles are allowed to alternate based on the last digit of their number plate being even or odd. Along with that local and federal governments can work together to bring in policy changes to levy more tax on personal vehicles and subsidize public transport.
To sum up, a variety of solutions ranging from renewed urban development schemes, a novel car pooling system, more taxes and subsidized transport can certainly aid in the daily slow moving long queues of vehicles in cities around the world.
