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Does the transport minister use public transportation?

Aug 25,2014 - Last updated at Aug 25,2014

The government decided to form a panel to study and resolve the problem of traffic jams in various Jordanian cities, including the capital.

Officials already attribute the exacerbation of the problem to several causes, including population growth, lack of parking spaces and excessive use of private cars.

Yet they fail to put the blame on the lack of a reasonable public transport system, lax law enforcement and inadequate city planning.

Authorities can do a lot to encourage people to forgo the use of their vehicles by improving the status of public transportation in the country, securing better law enforcement, particularly when it comes to clearing bottlenecks created by parked cars and businesses that clog Amman’s main arteries, and by fixing the roads, particularly the marking of lanes that are now only imaginary in many cases.

Unfortunately, the state of public transport in the country is really dismal.

People who use public transport are the ones who cannot afford to own private cars. They would be more than happy to find better substitutes if they could afford it. But so would many of those who own cars. It would be cheaper and less annoying to use a bus than one’s own car to navigate the streets of Amman.

Every time a government tries to come up with plans to tackle the public transport issue, there appear problems.

Attempts to replace smaller public transport vehicles, which are filling Amman’s streets, with bigger buses were never realised fully for many reasons, including concerns that the move would leave many unemployed.

In addition, minibuses are owned by people with influence keen on protecting their interests, when we know that public interest comes before anything else.

Amman is in dire need for solutions to the worsening traffic jams and lack of parking spaces.

The city has been growing haphazardly over the past decades, in a manner that city planners never predicted, becoming, from a little town with several thousand residents several decades ago, to a metropolis of more than three million now.

Of course, the number of residents increases dramatically during the holiday seasons, when the city absorbs many expatriates and tourists from around the region.

Amman, as well as other Jordanian cities, have also been receiving wave after wave of refugees, which made the number of their population swell to levels that municipal services could no longer handle adequately without some emergency plans.

According to the Traffic Department, there are over 1.29 million Jordanian-registered cars, in addition to around 150,000 that enter the country from Arab Gulf states every year. Most of these cars are used in the main cities, including the capital.

Amman is now in need of every effort to make its streets easily passable, through better planning and organisation, as well as by improving the deplorable public transport system.

Plans should include ways to breathe life into the suspended Bus Rapid Transport project, which came to a halt as a result of accusations of corruption and doubts regarding its feasibility.

In addition, the possibility of having underground transportation should not be discarded, particularly for certain parts of the city.

The government should give the issue of traffic its due, as it is expected to worsen in time, and to keep in mind that a solution to the transport problem would also be a remedy to the country’s rising fuel bill.

The Ministry of Transport needs to do its best to ameliorate services in cooperation with the Traffic Department and municipalities.

The minister and other concerned officials should also start using our public transport system to be able to evaluate it and to gradually restore people’s faith in it.

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