How many times in your life have you said the words “I hate traffic”?

Conducting a quick study, I found that my answer (“uncountable”) was often repeated which says something about the hate people have for traffic.  Imagine, for a second, a world without traffic. You can’t, can you? Neither can I and this is precisely what makes it so frustrating.  It represents one of modern society’s greatest teases.

It’s an appropriate topic for today – World Carfree Day. WCD is a symbolic initiative intended to help reduce the global reliance on cars via awareness and action.  I admire the intentions of WCD and like the now globally popular Earth Hour, I have concerns over the effectiveness but cannot argue with the awareness.  Doing something is always better than nothing.

But I’ve been surprised to find that there has been little mention of how reducing reliance on cars can also reduce the evil of traffic. Although saving the planet should be more important than fixing a societal challenge, it is nevertheless an idea that people can really understand because unlike rising temperatures, it’s something they consciously experience daily.

The suggestion I would make, therefore, might counter the more popular solutions to reducing traffic which are often too ideal and not properly thought out to actually happen,  at least immediately (i.e. multi-layered roads, transit cities, etc.). Someone pointed out to me that despite traffic, you can still get to somewhere quicker than any alternative methods. So long as that is the case, we will still have traffic and more importantly, still have too many cars.

Reduce roads, increase the likeliness of traffic.   We need the proliferation of traffic to couple with the environmental degradation or else we will just keep getting more cars. If we have more traffic, there is greater pressure on governments to invest in alternatives such as public transit and bike infrastructure. With more traffic, there is greater motivation for the individual to seek an alternative.  So yes, public transit can be the answer to both the traffic and the environment challenges but for that to happen, we need to the right catalyst to invoke the level of change we need.

I think that catalyst can be traffic – lots of it.