Kamal Ghorui
As elsewhere in India, Goa discovers that the path to traffic-hell is paved with good highways
In Goa I’m stuck in what seems to be an unending traffic jam. The jam is not caused by a chakka roko organised by protesters against the mass influx of Delhi and Mumbai holiday-home buyers, turning the tiny state into a deforested adjunct to Greater Kailash or Outer Ghatkopar, take your pick.
The traffic jam (Traffic jam? In uncrowded, unhustle-bustle Goa?) is caused by highways. When I first visited Goa, back in the 1970s, it didn’t have highways, nor did it have much traffic. There was the odd taxi or two, a trickle of two-wheelers, and a sporadic bus that rattled and wheezed along winding village lanes as sleepy and roundabout as a children’s bedtime story.
Then all of a sudden Goa got highways. And mass tourism. No one knows if mass tourism invented highways, or if highways created mass tourism. It’s like wondering which came first, the chicken or the egg. They both happened simultaneously. Along with traffic jams.
Hello? Aren’t highways supposed to prevent traffic jams, not to cause them? Yes, they are. But like many other things that are supposed to fulfil certain functions, highways have a lot of supposition and not much function.
Parkinson’s Law says that work expands to fill the time available for it. Applied to roads, that might be modified to say that motorised vehicles expand to fill the highways available to them. The more highways we have, the more cars, buses, trucks, three-wheelers, two-wheelers will miraculously materialise, out of thin air as it were, to take up the extra space so thoughtfully provided for them.
And the more cars, buses, trucks, three-wheelers, and two-wheelers we have, even more highways get built in Goa, Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, you name it. Which means even more cars, buses, etc, pop up to justify all that extra highway surface, which would otherwise go to waste.
It’s called Progress. And we’re literally getting jam-packed with it.
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