More infrastructure leads to more traffic, says expert : The Times of India

The Maharashtra government looking to bring in experts from the Netherlands to help design the coastal road that is is planned to run along the western coast of Mumbai.With much of their country built on reclaimed land, and sitting below sea-level, the Dutch are known for their expertise in coastal engineering and flood-protection. TOI spoke to Han Meyer, a professor of urban design at the prestigious Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and a well-known expert on “delta urbanism“, about lessons from highway building in Europe and the challenges of building coastal infrastructure in an age of rising seas. Excerpts from the interview:

On the Dutch's changing approach to coastal engineering

The Dutch experience has become famous because of the reclamation in the socalled Inner Sea, developed in the 1920s and 30s to extend agricultural land. But large-scale reclamation in the sea has also happened in more recent decades, to fix the coast with enormous dunes.

The policy has changed again in the last five years when we started experimenting with “Building with Nature“, partly because of concerns about sea-level rise and climate change. The most important experiment is happening in The Hague where a large amount of sand has been concentrated on the beach. The idea is to work with nature to stabilize the coastline instead of applying hard concrete structures. It is a new kind of engi neering that tries to manipulate natural forces instead of fighting against them. This approach is being taken seriously, including through Dutch collaboration with Americans in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. On the global experience with coastal expressways

Everywhere in the world, you can see these waterside expressways; most of them produce a lot of trouble in the long-term. There are smart examples, but they should be designed carefully and it will cost a lot of money.

During the 19th and 20th century, the coast was seen as the easiest place to build a motorway. Europe and America became covered with such motorways during this time but they became a problem later. As cities changed from industrial and port economies to creative and knowledge economy, their survival depended on attracting the creative class, through better relations with the sea and nice waterfronts, and these wa terfronts were blocked by enormous motorways. For the last 20 years, municipal governments have been trying to solve this problem by removing motorways. Boston, San Francisco, New York, are some famous examples of highway removal. Rotterdam, too, has been struggling to figure out how the big motorway that separates the city from the river can be redesigned.

In the long term, this will also be a question for Mumbai, so it is better to answer the question now, instead of first trying to solve the traffic problem with a highway, then thirty years later, having to redo it. Barcelona is a smart example; it designed its coastal ring road so that in some areas, it even slows down to integrate with pedestrian traffic. Barcelona's aim was to keep traffic moving while enhancing the city's relationship with the sea.In Mumbai, there should be a third goal: protection against sea-level rise and against increasing phenomenon of storm surges from the sea. On solving traffic congestion

More attention needs to be paid to modal split, with a focus on improved public transport. There are a few examples, like Tokyo and Hong Kong, also high-density cities, where the modal split is dominated by public transport. In Europe and America, we are still dependent on private cars, and the waterfront motorway was an important part of that network.

Generally, new motorways lead to new traffic and more pollution ­ unless you have electric cars or very clean engines --so it is an illusion that you can solve the traffic problem by a new motorway system. In Europe, we learnt that more infrastructure leads to more traffic.

On the environmental challenges of building on the coast

In the Dutch case, we have learnt that a hard separation between sea and land is destructive for the ecosystem. So we now want to get rid of concrete walls and dykes and create conditions for a gradual or slow transition from land to sea.If Mumbai pays attention to this aspect, in the longterm, it will help create ecologically-rich conditions.

In general we see that because of the intervention of mankind, because of urbanization, many coastal and delta areas are seeing a process of erosion.We drain land so the land sinks, dam rivers so rivers are not able to carry sediments to the sea, we make strong separation lines along the seacoast. How can we turn this development so erosion is stopped and use natural sources to strengthen the land? That is the long-term question for our survival.