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I wrote a piece of twice the length than what was published; and so leaving some after thoughts in this thread about the project's Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and some mitigation measures.
#RingRoadEconomicCorridor
#Rawalpindi https://twitter.com/ayesharshahid/status/1348152166582784000?s=20
#RingRoadEconomicCorridor
#Rawalpindi https://twitter.com/ayesharshahid/status/1348152166582784000?s=20
1. Accessing the EIA: Even though there was a public hearing, I missed all announcements in spite of my best efforts. The report is not present in the public locations it is mandated to be & government officials are difficult to get hold of and not very willing to share it.
2. Piecemeal EIAs: The EIA looks at impact of individual projects; but nowhere is all the development work evaluated altogether. This makes it easy to claim no significant impacts are expected.
E.g. the Ring Road EIA claims it will redirect 50,000 vehicles from the city center to the peripheries, thereby reducing emissions. It does not factor in at all how much additional traffic will be induced due to the land use changes happening around the Ring Road Corridor.
Both congestion and emissions will certainly increase rapidly in a few years’ time. Thus evaluating each project separately makes it very easy for the cumulative impact on city environment to be under-estimated.
3 major issues have been identified with the EIA by environmental experts: a. the project design and EIA have been done by the same consultant (conflict of interest), b. it fails to offer mitigation measures for environmental impacts, c. the plan lacks a resettlement plan
The Ring Road is subsidizing heavy freight traffic – which should never be on our roads in the first place. Therefore benefits go to transportation businesses but pollution & negative impacts hurt local population. A much better approach would be to redirect freight to railways.
Beijing has 6 ring roads – and yet both pollution and congestion remain significant issues. It is untrue that the Ring Roads reduce congestion; they simply shift emissions from inner city to outer; until the outer city corridor also develops and increase both within a few years.
6. Congestion is not solved by heavy engineering solutions – but by managing travel demand by providing good mass transit alternates/active travel (walk/bike) and making individual vehicular travel expensive.
7. Speculation funded housing societies in peripheries have high vacancies for 20-30 years while simultaneously driving land prices up making it more unaffordable. The real estate developers make massive profits by government investment in infrastructure like ring roads.
Government needs to develop tools like inclusive housing, betterment fees and land value capture to benefit from their investment. This is also a way to raise revenues for development authorities that are constantly cash strapped
8. Arif Hassan sb has great land reform recommendations that can be adopted immediately: “One: a land ceiling act whereby no one individual can own more than 500 square metres of developed residential urban land.
Two: a large enough non-utilisation fee on developed urban land to discourage speculative investment. Three: minimum density for any urban development project (including elite colonies) would be 450 persons per hectare to conserve land, protect the environment and promote equity.
Four: no loans will be provided for housing to those who have received loans previously. Finally, all available government land would, as a priority, be made available for housing for low-income groups.”
9. What’s a better use for 7 billion rupees (meant for land acquisition for Ring Road) in an austerity stricken government? Land acquisition for ring road or investment in upgrading public transit? Not all PT investments need to look like the jangla metro bus systems.
Existing para-transit can be easily upgraded and revenue generated from alternate means like congestion charging and paid parking. Imagine the number of people who will benefit from improved PT in the whole city vs those benefiting from a Ring Road
10. In short: keep land off the market; invest in PT; if govt is going to develop infrastructure, beneficiaries should be heavily taxed so govt. can benefit from its investments; invest in housing/jobs close to where people live (compact cities), put a hard check on sprawl!
