Encroaching pavements - the order of the day:

EST to enhance cities

By Dhaneshi YATAWARA

Today, the world is looking at long lasting development or in brief sustainable development. At present development is not considered achieved just with signs of sophistication. It needs a touch of environment friendliness too.

It is with this aim way back in 1992 the United Nations hosted a Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, better known as Earth Summit. Hoping for a historic opportunity to define pathways to a safer, more equitable, cleaner, greener and more prosperous world for all, the United Nations are to host another landmark event in June, 2012 at the same place.

This, the Rio 20+, could be a turning point to see what the human species have done to the earth in these two decades and to see what errors need to be corrected for the benefit of the future. Rio 20+ runs along several main themes and transport is common in more than one theme.

Focusing on environment conservation cum development Sri Lanka has understood the importance of Environmentally Sustainable Transport in sustainable development. Transport tends to create chaos more in the cities than in rural areas. Traffic jams would be the last thing an employee rushing to office would expect, but yet becomes unavoidable.

Under the Mahinda Chinthana – the Vision for Future, the Government focuses on the development of the road infrastructure contributes to the acceleration of economic growth and balance regional development and road improvement.

The Ministry of Environment joining hands with this effort is emphasising the need of Environmentally Sustainable Transport (EST) concept with the objective of improving the urban environment in Sri Lanka to reach the goal of emerging as Wonder of Asia.

Based on this, the Ministry of Environment organised a special training workshop for policy-makers as well as other stakeholders of transport and urban development on implementing EST giving special attention to areas like integrated land use and public transport planning, non-motorised transport and para transit, road safety, transport and public health etc along with ETS case studies. The concepts of Environmentally Sustainable Transport (EST) are to be incorporated into urban and road network development projects currently being undertaken by the government to create a pleasant and safe urban environment for city dwellers.

“By implementing these concepts into practice, the government plans to achieve a significant reduction in air and noise pollution, road congestion, pedestrian fatalities and accidents,” Addressing participants at the workshop Environment Minister Anura Priyadarshana Yapa noted that people, and not vehicles, would be placed in high concentration under this initiative allowing them to reclaim the urban environment.

“Environmentally Sustainable Transport (EST) is to make our cities more liveable, said Anura Jayathilake, Director air pollution and international relations under the Environment Ministry.

“What has happened is that in most of our cities the cars or the motor vehicles have become the priority and less attention given to pedestrians. Vehicles are in prominence not the people,” Jayathilake said. “Now what we want is to give the people the priority,” he said elaborating the highlights of the EST concept.

One the city roads looking at the pavements we have to question whether the pedestrians are given the priority. Explaining how the pavements are developed, Jayatilake said that most of the pavements are with so many obstacles for a walker. Un-organisable lamp posts, potholes, unevenly laid concrete blocks makes the walk difficult.

There are many roads in Sri Lanka where the bicycle lane is properly marked, but cannot be used because motor vehicles occupy that space for parking,” Jayatilake said explaining the difficulties faced by the authorities in implementing them.

“Even on the pavement vehicles can be seen parked. The pedestrians are not given the necessary priority,” he added. These are also part of promoting sustainable transport. We need to go for a paradigm shift from the present thinking towards a new concept.

Their attempt is to change the concept; the transportation behaviour. “Sustainable transport concept do accommodate people using cars and different sorts of motor vehicles.

The problem rise with machines taking over people’s behaviour patterns,” he said. Today a distance that our predecessors used to walk is replaced by cars, motor bikes or three-wheelers, if we take an example. “As the first step what the Ministeries of Environment and Transport have requested from the Road Development Authority and provincial authorities, who implement the Government’s road development projects, to keep enough space for pedestrians.

Implementing vehicle emission testing programs and setting up emission standards, improving vehicle and fuel qualities are ongoing programs. Improving fuel quality started in around 2002 from having unleaded gasoline in the country and provision of low sulphur diesel.

Earlier we had in the fuel we bought a sulphur content around 10,000 part per million (ppm) in 2002 and it was take down to 3000 ppm in 2004. Now our target is to lower that level to 500 ppm and 50 ppm of sulphur levels within the next 2 – 3 years. At the moment the Government is putting the effort to go for good quality fuel. We need to create space for parking at railway and bus stations. These can be simply implemented changes. If parking spaces are available people can come in their personal transport, if and when required, to get the public transport.

We need to promote these sort of combinations,” he said. “Promoting public transport does not mean people cannot keep a vehicle for them. They also must have a personal mobility mode which they could afford. But if people use more of the public transport it will be more friendly on environment and economy,” he added.

We have enough and more buses but they are operated in an unorganised manner. The private and public buses need to be brought to a one set time table in order to provide a better service to the public,” he said.“As the first step we are trying to include slight changes into the present transport behaviour. We are trying to promote cycling, walking and other modes of public transport like water transport,” said Jayathilake.