LAHORE has traffic jams and traffic congestion in the morning and afternoon; not when offices/businesses open and close, but when school sessions begin and end. Roads are chock-a-block with cars, and vicinities around schools are almost impossible to navigate. Since most schools are located in the middle of cities and in the middle of residential areas, this means major traffic issues for most residents around as well.

If Lahore has a population of 14 million people, a good 6-7m children and young people need to be transported to schools in the morning, and need to make their way home in the afternoon. And since most school start and end times are at, more or less, the same time, this inevitably means jams.

The situation must be no different in Karachi, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Multan, Quetta and Peshawar as well. Though there will be some variation by size of city, of course. What a traffic and environmental nightmare this is for these cities and their residents!

But is this the situation in all large cities? Actually not. There are three significant differences with some of the more ‘developed’ countries and cities. One, a lot of cities provide bus transport for taking children to schools. Instead of one or two children per transport, there are 40 odd students in a bus. This reduces congestion, pollution and road rage significantly. And since transport is state provided, school start/end times can be staggered as well.

We are looking at polluted cities where quality of life is going to be quite poor.

Two, most large cities have very developed public transport systems. The rest of the world has figured out that large cities cannot function without comprehensive public transport systems. We are still inching our way towards that realisation. So, a lot of children, even at primary level, but definitely middle school and above, go to school using the public transport system.

Three, public schools are much better in most of the ‘developed’ world, so children go to the nearest public school rather than children/parents choosing schools that are out of the neighbourhood or on the other side of the city. This allows many children to just walk over to their schools. This cannot happen if quality variance in schools is high and parents have to choose schools that are distant but better quality than schools in the neighbourhood. Have you seen the traffic jam on the Canal and Mall roads when children are being carted to Aitchison College in the morning? I am sure the same is the case with the large Grammars and Beaconhouses of the city. Children come from all over Lahore to Aitchison. The public schools of the neighbourhood are not a viable schooling option for a very large number of parents.

Do bear in mind this is an issue of choices that we, the society and the state, have made and continue to make. This is not the result of some inevitable development process. We, as a people, have chosen to invest in underpasses and widening of roads, at least in Lahore, instead of investing in public transport infrastructure and education and health facilities. How many underpasses have you seen in Manhattan or London? Lahore, I am sure, has a lot more! But is the traffic flow better in Lahore? Is Lahore a more livable city? Are pollution levels better in Lahore than London?

The last underpass or set of underpasses were made earlier this year in Lahore. When was the last good school made in the public sector in Lahore? When did we make the last large public sector hospital in Lahore? Was it Jinnah Hospital (which became fully operational in 1996)? Has Lahore’s population not increased by millions since 1996?

We have a population, according to the 2023 census, of some 241m. We are growing at 2.55 per cent per annum. This implies that some six million children are born in Pakistan every year (16,400 odd children per day)! Our cities are going to continue to grow and grow rapidly due to population increase as well as rural to urban migration (cities draw people with prospects of economic/social improvements). What is the Karachi, Lahore or Islamabad of tomorrow going to look like? If we are going to continue the way we have been going, we are looking at extremely polluted and non-navigable cities, where quality of life is going to be quite poor.

Think of some of the largest and most densely populated cities in the world, and many of them have water systems where people not only get water supply round the clock but tap water is safe for drinking. In some cities, the local government makes a point of advertising that citizens should not waste money on bottled water (which in some places is just tap water that has been bottled) and should drink tap water. Why is this not possible for cities in Pakistan? The answer is simple: we have not invested enough in water and sanitation infrastructure. There are very few places, in cities, where tap water is not contaminated or at least not unsafe.

Are these issues of resources only? Not quite. We, in every city, probably spend more on water and sanitation (when household expenses are also added to the total) than what is spent in other cities with better infrastructure, but we do not spend it on public infrastructure, and our public water and sanitation departments are not getting this funding and do not have the level of expertise and competence they should have. Similar dynamics exist in health, education and transport as well. The total expenditures are comparable or more, but we do not get the requisite quality of service through the public sector. The result is we spend more individually, but get poorer service collectively. How does this make sense from a collective perspective?

What is good for an individual might not mean that the same action done by all leads to a better outcome for all as well. If everyone uses a car/motorcycle to drop their child to school, we will definitely get a traffic and environmental mess. The same is true if everyone starts using bottled water and so on. Cities will become increasingly untenable and the quality of life will keep falling. We need to wake up and smell the solid waste.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives, and an associate professor of economics at Lums.

Published in Dawn, August 30th, 2024