“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transport.”—Gustavo Petro
Large metropolises have vast networks of streets, roads and railway tracks that serve as conduits for commuters to move from one end to another. On daily basis, one can say almost 24/7, there is a constant motion of cars, buses, trucks and trains carrying both passengers and cargo to their destinations. Due to the fact that most of the cities are spread over hundreds of square kilometers, it becomes impossible to cover these distances on foot, therefore using some mechanical form of transport becomes indispensable.
With the influx of automobiles on roads there are of course, a lot of disadvantages like accidents, air and noise pollution, because of which there are many consequential problems related to the health of human beings, plants, animals as well as the constructed surroundings. In order to mitigate these adverse effects, city planners go for mass public transport system.
Many benefits can be attributed to mass transit other than it being vital for the environment in addition to saving tremendous amounts of foreign exchange spent to import gasoline for the humungous number of private vehicles of all kinds, plying on the roads. For example, it reduces road congestion, it allows freedom and mobility, cuts down household expenses, allows people tension-free rides where they can catch up on sleep or continue their productive activities on their laptops or mobile phones. Besides physical advantages, it helps to improve social connections with decrease in driving time, that again is important for people’s mental health and emotional wellbeing.
Mass transit reduces road congestion, it allows freedom and mobility, cuts down household expenses, allows people tension-free rides where they can catch up on sleep or continue their productive activities on their laptops or mobile phones.
They say that it is easier to build a new house rather than renovate an existing one, especially when it is occupied. The same holds true for towns and cities, even more so when these happen to have an historical background. In the first place, planners should envisage establishment of new abodes with all modern amenities at reasonable distances with ample space for nature parks and agricultural lands instead of enlarging the current set-up.
Check out Model Town in Lahore that was established in 1921 as a self-catering residential society situated almost twelve kilometers from the then heart of the city. Till the time that the population was in control, Model Town remained a distant area for those living in and around the Walled City, but in recent years with mass rural to urban migration, concrete structures have rapidly been devouring the once beautiful city of gardens.
The same holds true for other Pakistani cities like Karachi, Hyderabad, Faisalabad, Sialkot, Rawalpindi, Peshawar and last but not the least, Islamabad, that once used to boast of massive green belts, is now overflowing with traffic, fly-overs and a rapidly expanding periphery. Haphazard and intense urbanization is actually killing the city’s character, giving rise to crime and all manner of social ills.
Attempts on making the cities safe by installing cameras have not been successful due to poor maintenance. Cleanliness and solid waste management too, are proving quite unmanageable with no local government in place to handle these at their end. In short, and taking a cue from the adage ‘small is beautiful’ one can confidently say that the more massive a city becomes, its operations become all the more complicated.
No experts were consulted to obtain proper advice as to improving the life of commuters, providing them with cheap, easily available and decent means of travel.
With all these countless challenges grimacing in the face of city administrators, one can imagine the commotion that arises when suddenly, large-scale changes in road infrastructure are immediately put into action. Such has become the destiny of Lahore, which has turned into an experimental platform for all kinds of mass transit envisaged on the spur of a moment by someone who did not bother to do his homework well and was merely interested in raising epitaphs after epitaphs bearing his name.
Resultantly, the residents of the city had and continue to have nightmarish experiences with detours, discomfort, dust, sickness in addition to property related conflicts particularly in the construction of flyovers, under-passes, signal-free conduits, Metro Bus Service and Orange Line Metro Train.
No experts were consulted to obtain proper advice as to improving the life of commuters, providing them with cheap, easily available and decent means of travel. There were many practical and much less expensive solutions that could have been considered and which would not have disturbed the denizens, nor would they have negatively affected the historical buildings in their vicinity. Of all these so-called mass transit initiatives, perhaps the Orange Train project has proved the biggest and financially the most unviable one so far. For the first time in its history, the province of Punjab has fallen in debt.
Vibration in the physical sense has been defined as the mechanical oscillations of an object about an equilibrium point. These movements may be regular, such as the motion of a pendulum, or random, such as the movement of a tyres on a gravel road. Vibration creates energy that has both beneficial and destructive characteristics. Where at times it can have soothing effects like the vibration of heart-beat emanating from a mother’s chest can calm down a restless infant, its constant occurrence can cause damage to man-made structures and even the nervous system in some cases.
Interestingly, because of the Orange Train, anyone sitting in the Supreme Court Lahore Registry situated on The Mall gets to hear the rumbling sound, with the building feeling the intense vibration of the train as it rolls past. It might not be wrong to say that these magnificent colonial structures were constructed with lifespan in the centuries, but the builders then definitely did not anticipate subjection to regular vibratory tremors. Neither did the people who chose to live in and around the 27-kilometer long track.
According to scholars, if such buildings are located close to railway tracks, the vibrations may be so intense that the residents may be able to feel them. Apart from numerous factors influencing the force of transmitted vibrations, such as frequency, ground characteristics or dynamic properties of buildings, they also identify individual sensitivity to vibrations, having a great impact on annoyance and sleep problems.
These kind of impulsive actions have completely destroyed the city’s image but worst still, have left the people wondering about the pedestrians’ fate who, in the absence of footpaths and convenient crossings seem to have been deprived of any right of way.