The oranging of Lahore

Out of my head

While PM Nawaz is off to London to fix up his faulty ticker one hopes that his younger sibling, CM Shahbaz has a change of heart too and puts a full stop to the Lahore Orange Line Metro Train project. I know, I know – it’s a pipedream (like most Pakistanis I oscillate wildly between cynical fatalism and senseless optimism).

History will probably repeat itself and the Sharifs will do exactly what they did with the Canal Road widening project. Once they were back in the position that they considered their divinely ordained right – large and in charge of the country’s biggest province (population-wise) – they took the baton from the departing Chaudhrys (the people who led the assault in the un-greening of Lahore when they ran Punjab) and decided that Lahore needed a solid booster shot of ‘development’ wherein centuries old trees would be chopped down mercilessly just so that we could add a couple of car lanes along the canal.

Lahore needed ‘progress’, they said. Something was needed to ease traffic, they said. Environmentalists be damned, environmental laws be damned, development experts be damned, town planners be damned – heck, the courts and court orders be damned. The Sharifs and their underlings carried on their merry tree-chopping ways until even the courts surrendered using the classic ‘fait accompli’ argument.

Ten years or so down the road (no pun intended) and, really, is traffic any better in the city? It’s probably worse. And it always was going to be because adding a few car lanes is not going to solve the traffic problems of a metropolis that is growing at the most rapid of rates. A research report on global transport released in 2015 confirmed what many laymen like me and many, many experts in the field had been saying then and still say now: building new roads and freeways only breeds more cars (not to mention the resultant noise and air pollution) and increases traffic, leading to a severe detrimental impact on a city’s residents’ health and well-being.

Did the Sharifs listen? Do they ever? In their ‘progress’-chasing, Dubai-wannabe-ing, mindset, it didn’t matter if they chopped down thousands and thousands of the pipal and neelum trees that lined the Lahore’s main artery, the canal, and were the city’s oldest residents. Weren’t they giving us – the whining, ungrateful lot of us – shiny, spanking new date palms as replacements? Lahore was going to be just like Dubai, dammit!

And now that Dubai has a metro system, by Allah, Lahore is going to have one too. The noisy, unappreciative environmentalists, town planners, concerned citizens and bleeding hearts can cry themselves hoarse all they want, nobody’s going to get in the way of a multi-billion dollar project, dammit. We’ll just ignore the court-ordered stay on further work on the Orange Line within a 200-foot radius of heritage sites. (So blatant is the violation of the court order that its private counsel has disassociated himself from the case). And we’ll keep on ignoring the stay until the court has no choice but to give in and allow the project to continue unabated as by then it would be – you guessed it – fait accompli.

The federal government has jumped in too to ensure that the Orange Line goes ahead. Let the Shalimar Gardens (and at least 25 other historical and protected sites along with it) be destroyed, we are getting another Dubai – whether we want it or not.

Ironically, now when Dubai is looking to buy culture and history for itself, we are intent on destroying – rather than preserving - our own rather wonderful and abundant heritage. Surely, there are other options – both environmentally friendly and practical. For example, here’s a thought. We don’t need a metro train system – especially not when it comes at such a great cost. We didn’t even need the Canal Road widening or the metro bus. All we need to do is tax the hell out of car owners (something like the Singapore model) – the more expensive the car the higher the road/congestion tax – and make it really expensive to drive cars during peak rush hours.

But, of course, we need to give the public a viable transportation alternative by reserving one lane of main (existing) thorough-fares exclusively for the use of state-of-the-art, well-maintained (possibly environmentally friendly) and government-owned (or, at least, government-regulated) public buses which run like clockwork on a specific, 10-15 minute schedule.

Sure, there are kinks to be worked out in such a proposal but it’s worth considering, isn’t it? In one fell swoop you raise taxes (always a problem in Pakistan), save on fuel costs and oil imports (oil costs Pakistan around $13bn every year – and that’s at current oil prices, down almost 60 percent from about two years ago; think of the impact on the economy if oil went back to $100+ per barrel) – cause less damage to the environment, ease the strain on the public exchequer, displace no residents, and – perhaps most importantly – preserve our architectural, historical and cultural legacy at the same time. It’s easy enough to implement and quicker too.

Of course, this means that there won’t be any multi-billion dollar projects but, surely, sometimes it’s worth it to do something for the greater good. It also doesn’t mean that pockets couldn’t be lined with such a project – there might be a few less zeroes but there should be enough to go around what with government-mandated, regular import of state-of-the-art, environmentally friendly, public buses.

Not that any such a thing ever happens in Pakistan but, you know, just saying.

The writer is a freelance columnist.

Email: Kmumtaz1@hotmail.com

Twitter: @KhusroMumtaz