Today I wish to share with you my thoughts about our ever-increasing traffic level in general and, in particular, with regard to our cities -- and just about when the time has come to visit friends and family during a national holiday period. Turkey is currently upgrading its railway network by adding second tracks as well as providing for high-speed rail links, starting with the Ankara-Eskişehir line. It is, however, common knowledge that people will always use their cars, too, and most likely even more so, taking a much welcome increase in purchasing power into account. In regard to İstanbul, there is this one matter that most residents and visitors alike complain about: traffic. Traffic unavoidably leads to congestion. İstanbul is an extremely well-managed cosmopolitan city, except for the ever-present traffic problem. So, what can be done?
Any mayor of a metropolis has only limited options when it comes to regulating traffic flow: One is to alienate core voters by banning private cars from the city center; another is to enrage local businesspeople when doing exactly that. The mayor might try to appease environmentally friendly voters by banning cars from the city center in order to create space for more pedestrian zones, while another option is doing nothing at all.
Is it really a Catch 22? Not necessarily! Pedestrian zones alone will not work -- Turkey is a nation of car owners and its citizen will want to use them on weekends and after work. Having even more cars in our city centers will not work, either -- even happy motorists turn into advocates of “green” issues if they have to wait for hours on end in traffic jams only to finally find an overpriced parking spot.
In 2003 the mayor of London came up with the idea of charging motorists for driving into their own city -- hence the congestion charge was born. Not so novel an idea then, as I witnessed a motorist charging system in Singapore way back in the early 1990s. They referred to it as “entering the central business district.” On a much smaller scale I saw similar attempts in mid-sized towns in Europe, where mayors tried to get rid of cars only to encounter opposition from both citizens and businesspeople.
Traffic in İstanbul has reached unbearable levels and something must be done -- and fast. Road rage is an everyday occurrence. Not to mention an ever-increasing number of accidents. Did you know that in Turkey and most other countries more people die in traffic accidents each year than are killed in terror attacks? They are hardly mentioned in the news though. Using public transportation is an educational effort. It only works, of course, if there is public transportation available.
An impact analysis on whether or not to institute a congestion charge would be a logical step. More and more television programs feature traffic problems from around the world, for example about Bogotá, as seen on the BBC, where a fast-track bus lane system has been established, but no congestion charge is levied.
Coming back to my question of whether or not İstanbul or other Turkish cities need a congestion charge, I am not sure. It is, after all, a very complicated approach, requiring the installation of closed circuit cameras at every vehicle entry point to the designated part of the city center. It furthermore asks for a vast additional administration to collect payments and to issue fines. An alternative could be to improve the public transportation network, establish more public bus routes and make parking in the city center more difficult -- less parking space, less traffic? The debate should not be limited to İstanbul -- I once traveled from Ören, near Kemalpaşa, to İzmir by car and, while the first part of the journey took us just about 50 minutes, entering the city itself took twice as long due to heavy congestion on an average weekday early evening. There is no clear-cut answer to this question; let’s see what our politicians come up with. After all, March 2009 and Turkish local elections are looming on the horizon. Cleaning up the air in our cities will be a major issue.
