The traffic menace is like no other. If motor vehicles kill and maim because of unsafe driving, they also offer a slower death by increasing levels of pollution in the atmosphere. Add to that the rising cost of fuel, and there’s no place to even scream and be heard since that gets drowned out by the horns blaring louder on the streets. In India, metro roads are choc-a-block. And if a recent CSE report is to be believed, it’s the towns, with their increasing number of car owners, that will soon leave us gasping for breath.
But there’s a way out, à la South Korea, which has decided to go on a clean drive. Starting next month, all government workers will have to compulsorily give their vehicles a break for a day each week. Of course, South Korea’s concerns are more to do with preventing precious fuel from going up in smoke — rather than our problem of exhaust fumes billowing out of the vehicles themselves.
So how do we travel for that one day of the week? Well, there’s a model for that too — in Paris, where certain streets are blocked for traffic on Sundays so that cyclists can have a free way. Or may be we could relearn how to use that primitive mode of transport — our two legs. It helps keeps the doctor away too.