It is said that time is money. According to this proverb, we waste QR70bn per year, if we convert into money the time employees and students waste at traffic signals on the way to offices and schools.
On the daily trip to work and back home, the average number of traffic lights on your way would be about eight. Taking into consideration actions like slowing down, stopping and shifting gears, which take four to six minutes, multiplied by the number of traffic lights, you get about 40 minutes in each direction, which means wasting about an hour and a third every day.
An hour and a third everyday means 45 hours monthly, and if we only counted workdays, we would find that we waste about 34 hours monthly, which means about 400 hours annually. Moreover, if we multiply 400 hours by the number of people — if we take that the number of employers, workers and students is about a million and a half — we will get an enormous number of hours that we waste every day.
Our economy loses about QR70bn every year due to traffic lights, and we have not even calculated how traffic congestion impacts the economy. Psychologically, it affects your mood significantly, as you leave your house in a good mood but things start to change after the fourth traffic light. Then, after reaching your workplace, you need about 15 minutes to recover from the harassment on the roads.
Can we hope someday to see our streets free of traffic lights? There is no doubt that in the recent past the Public Works Authority has implemented plans for preparing wide alternative roads that are designed to make traffic movement on the streets more streamlined, in order to show how the administration is keen to provide roads and build them in a way that causes minimum nuisance.
So far, I do not see that doing away with traffic lights is a part of the authority’s strategy. It is expected to build roads, tunnels and bridges that help streamline the movement of vehicles to make driving more fun and to improve work efficiency.
However, all this does not include pedestrian bridges, despite the fact that pedestrians are at risk of getting hit by speeding vehicles. I have seen with my own eyes, on Salwa Road, cars running over a worker who was daring enough to cross the street. When the cars were driving back to save him, they ran over him again, and do not ask me what I felt when I saw that. I wondered why there were no pedestrian bridges or tunnels.
I often wonder if Qatar was the first to do that. The world has preceded us over the centuries, so why cannot we learn from others? The whole world is building pedestrian bridges and foot bridges, and I do not know why there are no pedestrian bridges between the Corniche and Salwa Road to save pedestrians’ lives.
Most of the areas in Qatar, especially highways and public places, do not have pedestrian bridges. All we can find is traffic lights that obstruct cars on roads that have four lanes. The whole road sometimes get choked with traffic for one person to cross it. Pedestrian bridges can relieve traffic congestion unlike traffic lights that stop the whole traffic.
If there are any complications that prevent constructing pedestrian bridges or tunnels, the minimum the authority should do is to present to the public its point of view and reasons for not implementing projects that provide safety to commoners.
What really scares people is that all of this work and investments is being done reluctantly. Was this infrastructure outlined in Qatar National Vision 2030? It is an integrated system of roads and we might be surprised that we were wrong and the roads will be adequate, but looking at all the indicators, a few questions arise.
We thought that it was essential to have six lanes on the main streets, but instead we got surprised that there were only three lanes, and there is congestion already, so what will it be like after 17 years?
The economy and citizens will suffer through the phase of development and improvement, and hopefully this suffering will come to an end eventually. There are lots of solutions that can help ease traffic congestion, such as decentralisation of government departments and agencies, which means distributing or opening offices in different areas, having different working hours according to the areas and ministries, improving the public transport system to make it more organised, looking into the possibility of working from a distance, installing traffic lights that work in conjunction with each other and laying down procedures that should be applied in case of accidents.
