Cities for Drivers or Cities for Pedestrians

There are cities where everything is done for drivers, and there are cities for pedestrians. In our country, it is very hard to tell whom our cities are meant for. Take Almaty: under Baibek, the city began to be turned into a city for pedestrians, which is entirely logical. A large city that was built a hundred years ago is very hard to adapt for motorists, because it would be catastrophically expensive for the country. So it makes sense to make Almaty a city for pedestrians. Although, judging by what is happening in our city, this thesis is easy to dispute.

There is a well-known book, The Goal, which describes the theory of constraints, or bottlenecks. I think many people have read this bestseller. The point is that there is no sense in widening a bottleneck in one place without widening it along the entire chain: all we do then is spend money without solving the problem.

Yesterday I drove toward the Nauryzbay district, and it took me 1.5 hours along Al-Farabi and Saina, and then 10 minutes from Saina to my destination. Five years ago it was roughly the other way around. Over this period we built a pile of interchanges at the city entrances wherever the terrain allowed, and the traffic jam simply moved from the outskirts to the city center. Al-Farabi is now gridlocked around the clock. Trillions of tenge have been spent on interchanges, yet this has done nothing to solve the problem of traffic jams.

If we don't try to reinvent the wheel and look at European cities, many of them tackled congestion with the same set of methods: well-developed public transport, an extensive metro, expensive parking in the city center, speed limits, congestion charges for entering the city, a large number of trains between the city and its satellite towns, and proper urban planning. Unfortunately, in our country all of these methods would be received extremely negatively, because we want cheap public transport, free parking in the city center, free entry into the city, enormous shopping malls and bazaars right along the highways, high-rise buildings on narrow streets, a downtown in the mountains (rather than in the lower part of the city, as everywhere else in the world), and a speed limit of 80 km/h instead of 40 km/h, and so on. All these wishes are simply killing our city and making it uncomfortable. Unfortunately, we are still not able to take the unpopular measures that cities so badly need.