None of 75 traffic plans well implemented in 20 years

Bishnu Prasad Aryal
Kathmandu, November 6

Some 75 plans on urban transport system have been developed during the last two decades. However, no plan was effectively implemented owing to the lack of coordination among four different implementing government bodies.

The Ministry of Home Affairs, the Ministry of Labour and Transport (MoLT), the Ministry of Local Development, and the Ministry of Physical Planning and Works (MoPPW) have been working on the transport management of the country but to no avail regarding the achievement.

"The achievement is nothing significant and the transport system in the Kathmandu Valley remains haphazard making the city polluted, ugly and unworthy of healthy living," said Dr Pushkar Bajracharya, member of the National Planning Commission. "There were 75 urban transport development plans formulated but not a single policy was fully implemented," he added. "The advocacy on the transport management in the last two decades has been fruitless."

Superintendent of Police Pawan Prasad Kharel of Metropolitan Traffic Police Divison said that the lack of coordination was the major factor of the problem. "The NPC formulated policies but all of the programmes were not sent for the practices due to the lack of budget and other lapses," he said.

The NPC started including the urban development and transport management in the seventh five-year plan (1985-1990). "The gross negligence on the plans since the beginning pushed the urban transport management into an abyss due to the lack of coordination among the implementing agencies but not because of resources," said Purna Kadaria, secretary at the MoPPW. "If this trend persists, the problem will be multiplied day by day," he said.

According to the MoLT, there were only 26,000 vehicles of all sorts registered in Bagmati Zone in 1980. The number of those vehicles counts to 444,700 in 2009.

The law provisions the concentration of PM10, pollution level in the air, upto 120 ug/m3 (24 hours). Now it has reached upto 200 ug/m3 in roadsides, 149 ug/m3 in residential area and 134 ug/m3 in average in the valley, a report of the Asian Development Bank says. The ratio of pollution was 100 ug/m3 in average in the valley in 2003.

About 19,000 children below five year died of respiratory problem caused by emission pollution in Nepal in the past years.

Kamal Raj Pande, joint-secretary at the MoPPW, said, "Forty-two per cent of the pollution is caused by vehicle emission, affecting in the climate change. Therefore, we must adopt the sustainable policies and programmes to control the haphazard."

David Irwin, leader of the Kathmandu Sustainable Transport Project of ADB on Technical Assistance, said that the formulation of visionary policies and law were necessary to tackle the problem. Coordination and implementation of policies are must to solve these problems, he said. "Encouragement for the public vehicles and control over the private cars and motorcycles will be best way to manage the transport of the Kathmandu Valley," he added.

The ADB has started the project of 6.5 months from October 5 to study on a vision for sustainable urban transport, including immediate measures to improve the operations of public transport and upgrading of the bus parks, traffic management plan for the central area of Kathmandu and pedestrian only areas within the old towns of Kathmandu.