As with many other countries, it will now be forbidden to light up in restaurants, bars or coffee houses, and there are posters featuring smiling officialdom from the prime minister down, happy to claim credit for bringing relief to the nation's pulmonary tracts. I would feel more grateful on behalf of my fellow non-hubble-bubblers if it weren't for the fact that those same politicians are rubbing their hands with pleasure at the thought of spending $4 billion to turn the lungs of İstanbul into a giant ashtray. They are building a bridge to nowhere.More succinctly, the Directorate of Highways has confirmed its intention to go out to tender this autumn to construct a third bridge across the Bosporus. The new bridge will make the crossing to the north of the famous straits and thus transect (certainly when compared to the conurbation at the mouths of the other two bridges) a relatively uninhabited part of the city. Even without a bridge to incite new housing development, the green hills of Black Sea end of the city are being eroded by poured concrete. This is the belt which the city needs to generate clean air and water. The Ömerli water reservoir, on the Asian side, apart from being an important watershed, is a unique microenvironment created by moist air blowing in from the north encountering the warmer front from the Marmara Sea. There are some 2,000 species of plant in the greater İstanbul region, 150 varieties more than the entire United Kingdom -- a land mass 50 times its size.
İstanbul's two Bosporus bridges are notorious in urban planning literature for generating the very traffic they are meant to alleviate. The authorities argue they will do better this time and say the bridge is not designed for commuting traffic but to divert intercity traffic from Thrace into Asia. Two of the proposed six lanes will be dedicated to rail traffic which will connect with the new Metro system. That the bridge will not encourage speculative construction on the Bosporus, however, and not be a source of exhaust pollution, will not convince a skeptical İstanbul, which heard the very same pledge at the time of the construction of the second Bosporus bridge in 1988. That, too, was meant to be reserved for long distance travel, with no exits or entrances anywhere close the Bosporus to keep commuter traffic away. It didn't take long for the highway department to go back on this pledge, and there are busy turnoffs on both the Asian and European sides, just after the bridge hits land.
Already we have seen Swiss and Austrian credit for the Ilısu Dam project in eastern Turkey evaporate because the State Waterworks Authority (DSİ) tried airbrushing over the environmental impact of the project. I have yet to meet anyone who believes that the negative impact of a third bridge could be contained. There is still the problem of İstanbul's commuters. The summer holidays should be a time when the traffic circulates more briskly, but this recent announcement came at a time when the second bridge is undergoing repairs, and congestion is as bad as ever. Instead of proposing new bridges, planning authorities have to convince motorists to abandon their vehicles as a means of getting to work.
But who are these planning bodies? The third bridge figured very little in the recent municipal election campaign -- not that it would have mattered since responsibility for it falls to national agency, not the local authority at all. One sometimes gets the impression that the new definition of democracy in Turkey is sending the generals to the barracks and leaving the politicians to get on with the job. This is the other side to the democratic process, which is holding those same politicians accountable to current stakeholders and future generations. There will be a protest march from Çayırbaşı (near Büyükdere) to Sarıyer on Saturday, July 18. I might just go along.
