Road Obstacles throughout Lahore and their solution

Driving down a main road, in nearly all areas of the city of Lahore, it is very surprising not seeing something blocking part of the road, whether it is half or a little and in some cases nearly all. For pedestrians and especially commuters, traveling has become something which is avoided at all costs until necessary. Traveling is a necessity in life whether it is going to work, to a relatives/friends house, casual enjoyment or leisure, this is something which every citizen in Pakistan has the right of doing, but due to situation of our roads, it has become undesirable and termed as a hassle. 

An example of this is the main Wafaqi Colony road, which comes on the left driving down the canal bank before the Doctors Hospital signal. There are a number of worn out speed breaker’s that wear out the car ever time it crosses over along with donkey carts and fixed stalls which are entirely on the road and are blocking at the least one lane of traffic.

 

These obstacles, which are found nearly everywhere, given the above mentioned road is just an example, make the hard life of working people, even harder.

 

Firstly, this should be the duty of the local police to take care of the situation and implement orders from the Lahore City and District Government to disallow such people to create blockage on any road. They are the only people who can really make a difference if they wanted to but sadly when these fruit/vegetable stalls and people who make illegal speed breakers are asked why and how they do what they do, the reply is that which one expects, and that is they have paid off the police.

 

Whenever there is a road block anywhere, a police truck can be seen speeding and cutting other cars to get out of the situation and instead of doing their duty to resolve the problem, they run away from it.

 

Clearing all these donkey carts and fruit stalls creates a situation which is clear, unemployment and lack of income for those individuals, so a solution must be carved out.

 

A simple and worthwhile long-term solution to such a problem can be to observe what modern and first world countries like the United States, Canada and European countries have done to deal with the situation that also plagued their streets in the early 1900’s.

 

Creating farmer markets specific for different areas would be a first priority solution which could actually work. All the local government would have to do is allocate land for the farmers market where all these produce sellers must gather and make it a selling point for all fresh vegetables and fruits, which are at the moment the main obstacles on roads.

 

Doing so will not only create competition between sellers, thus demolishing the current area wise price monopoly, but it will also allow consumers to gather at one point and buy produce at a single point, eliminating the need to travel far out for the best prices.

 

Since the city of Lahore is already divided into different zones, such zones should have specifically allocated farmer markets and it should be banned for such fruit/vegetable donkey carts to roam the streets.

 

Ultimately, this will clean up the streets, ease the heavy flow of traffic, change the look of Lahore for the better and eventually start a trend which will spread throughout the country and revolutionize the way we function as a society and go towards a more modern, 21^st century approach.

With this enforced, commuters will be extremely grateful of going from start to destination in a peaceful and happy mood instead of having to apply the brakes every now and then and fight with donkey cart owners.

 

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Posted by Syed Hassan Bokhari on Aug 3 2012. Filed under Pakistan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.