Urban Bystander
At the M-Tag registration centre in Kachnar Park, I-8, Constable Tufail had stopped counting vehicles. He now counted impossibilities. “Three hundred and seventy-five new registrations daily,” he said, stirring his chai. “We’ve issued about a hundred thousand tags.”
“Out of?”
“1.7 million vehicles. For 2.4 million people.”
The arithmetic hovered between them like exhaust: one vehicle for every 1.4 residents, more road per capita than Lahore or Karachi, yet worse gridlock.
Above the signal, Babloo the pigeon adjusted his perch on a Safe City camera and opened his ledger.
“Day 3,847.M-Tag centre operational. Queue creating congestion at a facility designed to manage congestion. Deadline extended from November 27 to January 1 and then to January 15. Institutional consistency.” He had been archiving Islamabad’s vehicular life since the cameras arrived, and then watched many go dark.”
Nosy Mynah hopped onto the signal arm. “16 centres. 12 hours daily. 1.7 million vehicles.”
“260 vehicles per hour,” Babloo said without looking up. “Including when people sleep.”
“So the deadline is?”
“Optimistic. Or, as the memos say, pending better traffic behaviour.”
By mid morning, Faizabad had completed its ritual: two hundred and fifty thousand people entering through a single junction. Rawalpindi arrived first, hopeful and tired. Islamabad followed reluctantly. Blue Area waited, immobile, certain everyone would come to it eventually. Vehicles entered the capital the way pilgrims enter a shrine: reverent at first, then desperate, then angry.
At ShaheenChowk, Barkat Contractor materialised for the underpass ribbon cutting. When asked if the new loop would ease congestion, he smiled with the calm of a man who had read all the reports and financed half of them. “We added roads. They added vehicles. 88 percent of the budget built asphalt. 11 percent built transit. It’s a race we designed.” By evening, he had vanished. Barkat appeared only when concrete poured, never when it pooled.
At the Directorate of Vehicular Proliferation, MirzaChughalKhor watched a file marked Interim change hands. Someone proposed extending the M-Tag deadline until “traffic patterns improved.”
Mirza tilted his head. “We first waited for improvement in 2015,” he noted. “Traffic has since grown older, heavier, and more confident.”
“So the deadline?” someone asked.
Mirza smiled faintly. “Will extend,” he said, “until numbers learn manners. Draft the memo for January 14th.”
Back at the registration centre, Tufail watched the queue lengthen. 200 people received tags while 375 new vehicles quietly joined the count. An old man asked why Islamabad had the worst traffic despite having more roads per person than anywhere else.
Tufail thought for a moment. “Every road invited another car,” he said. “They just kept coming, each one convinced it was the last.” Most carried one person. Air-conditioned.Important. Certain the traffic was everyone else’s fault. Islamabad’s traffic problem, Tufail observed, “was largely composed of people who hated traffic and refused to stop being it.”
By dusk, the tide reversed. Islamabad exhaled. Tufail would be transferred soon, rain season, perhaps, or after the next underpass.
Above him, Babloo closed his ledger.
Faizabad: standard gridlock. ShaheenChowk: ribbon cut, awaiting rain. Tags issued: 200. Vehicles added: 375. Coordination: none.
“Think they will ever fix it?” Nosy Mynah asked.
“When equilibrium arrives,” Babloo replied.
“When’s that?”
“When everyone owns a vehicle, every road is full, and there is nothing left to coordinate.”
Someone once asked Mirza what the difference was between policy and traffic.
“About Rs 20 billion in roads,” he replied, “and 1.7 million vehicles’ worth of lived experience.”
The city slept.
By morning, it would move again; heroically, ceremonially, and absolutely nowhere.
The writer can be reached at [email protected]
