Traffic Jammed

Editorial:-
Traffic is a problem in Gangtok. The jams are becoming longer and denser and parking has emerged as a challenge for which no one has presented an enforceable, practical solution. There is, after all, only so much road for the march of vehicles which show no sign of tapering off. A recent meeting to discuss these problems floated some options. While accepting that the problem has now grown so big that a solution will not be painless, it is important that the policy-makers, before they unleash more rules and regulations, see to it that the personnel who will be given more rules to enforce and hence more ‘power’, are first groomed with better interpersonal skills. Traffic and parking problems are ubiquitous to urbanization and the only places which have managed to ease the situation to more manageable levels have done so through participatory policing where traffic cops, beat cops and community representatives worked together. Some localities in Gangtok too have managed to manage their parking problems by building consensus on locality-specific regulations and then leveraging police assistance to ensure compliance which they oversee themselves at a community level. This convenience contrasts starkly with the confusion that has returned to the highway where only traffic personnel toil away. Even here, the portions where individual taxi stand associations assist traffic flow, the management is better. Elsewhere, it is traffic and police personnel with clamps scowling and hyperventilating their writ on the roads. The call for induction of better interpersonal skills for cops was made because at present, the police, both beat and traffic personnel, engage with defaulters as if they were criminals. Traffic and parking violations do not constitute criminal transgressions and people can be challaned, even taken into custody, but should not be shouted at and screamed off the roads as often happens. And now the policy-makers are even contemplating stricter policing against jay-walking. This, without proper sensitization, is again a bad idea because there have already been embarrassing incidents of grown-up people new to Gangtok being screamed at by traffic cops for having walked across the road instead of having taken the pedestrian flyover. Civic habits are the most resilient when they are inculcated, when enforced by people in uniform, they only agitate people and make chances of collaborative solution finding that much more difficult. And traffic and its regulation has really become a big problem for Gangtok, making a collaboration to ease it important.