Uttarakhand: Techniques to Manage Traffic and Crowds
If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. -Benjamin Franklin
Pilgrims visiting Char Dhams encounter kilometer-long traffic jams and significant delays in getting darshan. The main reason: planning in silos for road upgrades, which failed to consider its impact on the increase in commercial and building activity, and the rising need for water supply and garbage/wastewater disposal.
The lack of integration between transport and land-use planning and infrastructure provision has caused major operational issues on the ground, with no clear solutions. Administrators manage by taking a series of small, remedial steps in the "right" direction, known as incrementalism (also called muddling through).
For example, administrators address vehicle pileups on roads by setting up impromptu roadblocks, allowing vehicles to pass only in one direction, and stopping all vehicles coming from the opposite direction. These benefits are temporary, as counter effects soon emerge. By restricting vehicle movement to one lane, the road capacity gets halved without reducing the number of vehicles, creating bottlenecks elsewhere. To resolve this, administrators place more barriers at multiple locations, often without advance warning to motorists, which leads to increased road rage incidents and widespread littering.
To tackle the self-defeating nature of these responses, a larger model must guide incremental decision-making. This approach is akin to repairing an airplane engine mid-air. The following techniques make the best possible use of partial knowledge and general principles:
Focused trial and error: This consists of knowing where to start the search for an effective intervention and checking outcomes at intervals to adjust and modify the intervention. For example, divert vehicles onto alternative routes when entering Uttarakhand and share this information with all arriving visitors/vehicles in advance. Based on real-time assessments, detain vehicles in larger cities for fixed periods, not on roads. This technique links to another, called tentativeness or a commitment to revise one’s course as necessary.
Reversible decisions: Administrators take care to avoid over-commitment in rapidly changing circumstances. For example, to manage queuing in temples, the typical response is to ban all special darshans and stick to it. Given the informal systems at the local levels, this would be partially implemented at best, creating uncertainty and scope for lobbying.
Fractionalizing: This adaptive tool treats important judgments as a series of sub-decisions. For darshans, the objective would be to accommodate special darshan without inconveniencing common pilgrims. One way could be to earmark an exclusive half-hour for special darshans and stop this practice on weekends and festivals.
Decision staggering: Individuals set goals for themselves and seek to push them through, generating emotions and introducing politics in decision-making. Management requires building cooperation and coalitions with stakeholders, and decision staggering is one way to manage politics and emotions.
An administrator’s ability to troubleshoot depends on having an adequate mental model to explain how something works. This approach overcomes fragmented planning, as these adaptive techniques allow administrators to make the best possible use of partial knowledge rather than proceeding without knowing if their present course is right.
