Srinagar, June 24: If the density of vehicles in Jammu and Kashmir has shown a sharp increase from 2.7 vehicles per Km of road length in 1974-75 to 32 vehicles per Km in 2009, soft car loan schemes coupled with lack of adequate roads are a major contributor to this congestion.
According to Trafficinfo, the J&K Traffic Department’s annual publication, against 19,808 vehicles registered in 1974-75, 6,68,445 vehicles were registered by March 2009 by the Regional Transport Authorities. “This clearly indicates that over the past 34 years the vehicular population has increased by about 33 times. However, this does not include the vehicles belonging to security forces operating in the valley and others not registered by the RTAs,” writes the former Inspector General of Police (Traffic), M A Shah, in the Trafficinfo.
But, he adds, against 7,315 Kms of road length recorded in 1974-75, only about 21,000 Kms of road length stands maintained by various engineering wings up to 2009, indicating two-fold increase of the road length in the past 34 years. “Based on this, one can conclude that the density of vehicles has shown a sharp increase from 2.7 vehicles per Km in 1974-75 to about 32 vehicles per Km in March, 2009,” Shah writes, blaming “soft car loan schemes” by several loan lending institutes for the mess.
According to the Department, schemes have been designed in such a manner that customer can purchase a car with petty monthly installments. “This has attracted even man in the street to go for the car irrespective of the fact whether he needs it or not. I am not surprised to learn that most of these buyers do not have space to park their vehicles at their homes. The boom purchase of Maruti cars has added to the already swollen traffic on Srinagar roads. Such type of car loans, therefore, needs to be dispensed with at least till the roads are cut to commensurate with the volume of traffic on the roads,” Shah writes.
The Department has called for rationalization of transport policy. “No doubt the state has other important priority sectors to take care of, but at the same time it should not loose sight of this important area of the public concern. Stress is needed to be laid on the standardization and expansion of roads, construction of flyovers and overhead walkways, building of bye-passes and urban expressways, laying of eco-friendly railways and subways, introduction of air transport and reviewing of water transport,” the Trafficinfo mentions.
The government, it mentions, needs to push in required number of Road Transport Corporation buses on routes where there is insufficient public transport. “The government should discourage personalized transport and instead encourage the public transport in the cities to avoid over-crowding on the city roads. Further, the deployment of High Occupancy Vehicles (HOV) should assume more importance than the low occupancy public transport. The use of HOV facilities, which focus on increasing the movement efficiently on a road or travel corridor, is aimed at addressing traffic congestion and environmental concerns as well as reducing delays to buses and increasing their reliability,” the publication mentions.
The Department has urged the government to conduct a detailed survey to ascertain the actual requirement as also the type of passenger transport on the “hungry/non-lucrative” routes. “The regional transport authorities should encourage locals to form transport companies on cooperative basis. These companies may be given soft loans by the government to operate the public transport on such roads,” it mentions.
Pertinently, the Trafficinfo says about 79% of the population lives in the rural areas of Kashmir and about 21% lives in Srinagar. “Against meager 37% of transport registered in the rural areas of Kashmir, a huge 63% of the transport is registered in city Srinagar. The huge transport in Srinagar with non-commensurable roads leads to the menace of traffic jamming. The density in the city of Srinagar is over one hundred vehicles per Km of road when those vehicles which are not registered but plying in Srinagar are also taken into consideration. This is the reason that roads of Srinagar are seen over crowded with the vehicular traffic as over hundred vehicles, as stated above, are statistically distributed over one kilometer of road length at a particular point of time,” it says, “Huge quantity of 78% personalized transport as against small quantity of 22 % of public transport stood registered in the State by March, 2009.”

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