If someone told you that no matter what you did, you were wasting your life for nothing, you would no doubt be angry with him. What if the same person told you, you were spending too much of your life, not on work or attending to important business, but out in the street tied to your car?
The report that people in the region are wasting far too much time in their cars was confirmed by a recent conference on traffic safety in the Gulf.
The conference discovered that motorists in Riyadh spend 1.5 million hours yearly on the road. Forty-five percent of this time is wasted at traffic signals and the rest spent on driving.
No doubt, the finding affects both men and women in the Kingdom. Just because women do not drive does not mean their time is not wasted. With our youth anxious to drive from an early age, we should expect their time to be wasted too. A recent study has shown that the Kingdom has the largest percentage of underage drivers in the Gulf. Some 45 percent of intermediate and 87 percent of secondary school students are drivers.
With almost everyone racing to own and drive a car, we should not be surprised to see our life ending while sitting in a car.
Nobody would willingly volunteer to spend their lives as prisoners at home just so others could roam the streets. It is not selfishness and egoism that is to blame for the chaos on our roads but rather the absence of a practical and efficient public transport system and the lack of resilient and smooth urban planning.
In a city such as Riyadh, the problem is compounded by a rapid increase in population and migration from rural areas. Eight years from now the present city of four and a half million will have grown to a city of ten million. To cope with this population explosion, Riyadh will require $15 billion for housing alone.
What about roads and streets. And we must also keep in mind that money is not as abundant as it once was.
Arab News From the Local Press 24 December 2002
