Inept planning proves to be Mumbai’s bane

Mumbai isn’t sleeping any more. It never did, as the adage goes. Only now the wink-less insomnia has been inflicted by inept civic planners, who in their effort to implement medieval blueprints, lack even teenaged prescience so far as lousy ideation is concerned. Let me give you three instances of our planners’ stone-age myopia.

Instance one: The ubiquitous traffic snarls. Despite the best of sedans moving on our roads, we have the poorest design standards for speed, safety and fuel efficiency. Consider the use of median road dividers to reduce opposite-direction collisions, an outdated method which has hardly met with success in a burgeoning city.

Have we ever endeavoured to learn from a small city like Copenhagen where dividers are operated electronically to increase the width of one side when congestion increases? Even our neighbour, Thirupathi Tirumala Devesatanam, an authority on crowd management, has some 30 different ways of handling crowds. But our city mandarins seem more intent on their own feckless manoeuvrings.

Instance two: The Worli-Mahim Sealink will soon become a reality. A case of good thought, but poor afterthought. Right you are in thinking that the sealink would remain a novelty on paper and a cumbersome exercise on road, until the toll collection system is reworked. If you need to wait for over 10 minutes to pay your toll, the concept of the bridge has collapsed. Claims of some electronic collection system being in place is actually aged over three decades.

Tell me, why hasn’t the Singapore/Dubai GPS-led payment plan via chip-embedded debit cards been replicated here? Imagine toll tax being paid through an electronic system in which overhead devices automatically deduct pre-paid toll credits assigned to a stick-on tag affixed to a car’s windscreen, much akin to swiping bar-coded items through a grocery checkout counter. With this, you can zip past the road even at a speed of 80 kmph, yet your toll is collected without human intervention. That’s what’s done in all developed nations. Oops, I forgot. Aren’t we in a developing nation with underdeveloped third-world mindset?

Instance three: Metro services in the suburbs are more crowded than South and Central Mumbai. Correct? Then why is an underground route proposed only for South Mumbai and not western suburbs, particularly for places like Andheri and Bandra? An elevated metro route will only displace shops, residences and trees, not to speak of roads and pavements being further narrowed and noise pollution reaching a crescendo. But that is myopia for you and I, not them. The planners be praised!

Lastly, two weeks away from the rainy season, not many have raised the hatchet for cleaning up of the drainage system, except for Uddhav Thackeray issuing political fatwas to BMC to brush up its scavenging act. You are apprehensive? So am I. The question is, who else is?

The value of an idea lies in the prudence of its implementation. So said American inventor, Thomas Alva Edison. Well-intentioned ideas are not enough. To ensure that they are practically viable, without actually compounding existing problems is the key to a successful project. It’s time to usher in a new age — one of reliably viable and unobtrusive ideas.