I have an article in the new Outpost!
This piece is based on interviews and an outline made by Andrew which I fleshed out and weaved together with some of my own research. Here is the text of the final draft that I submitted; those of you who picked up the issue can play “spot the difference” with the print version:
In the last two years, everyday Lebanese grumblings about the state of our roads — potholed, congested and dog-eat-dog — have begun to take a more organized form. Campaigns like Cheyef 7alak? and Lawen Ray7in? have leveraged social media platforms to amplify these grievances and, in the latter’s case, voicing more actively an explicit demand for public transport.
What is most interesting about this recent development is how it seems to express a growing acceptance of mass transit as a right and value in and of itself, and not just as a means to cleaner, greener living. This gradual shift away from the car as a status symbol of modernity and success, however unlikely it seems, is occurring in many cities around the world. In Lebanon, public imagination and policy is still locked somewhere in the middle, between car- and transit-orientation. To move forward, what we need is more clarity about the direction we want to take.
As Yasmine Mahdi Taki argued during ‘Public Transportation, Public Concern,’ a mini-conference organized by RoterAct and FastForward in 2010, Lebanon’s transport sector during the early ‘70s was in great shape, adding:
“Unfortunately, the sector suffered a great deal during the many wars that rocked Lebanon: infrastructure was destroyed, maintenance work was absent, management was inadequate, etc. On top of that, the transport sector is still being managed haphazardly due to a total lack of the necessary policies.” (translated from Arabic)
Since the war, policymakers have mainly focussed on the ‘quick fixes’ of road-widening, and new road and bridge construction. Certainly, one reason for this is that such projects are often used as means of pleasing political constituents. The materialization of a culture of corruption in electoral asphalt (الزفت الانتخابي) is only part of the problem, however. The heart of the issue is that we don’t need new roads. According to Mahdi Taki, the 22,000 KM of roads in Lebanon means that “we have plenty.” We just “don’t know how to use them well.”
Furthermore, new roads simply means more cars. In what has been described as the Iron Law of Congestion, traffic expands to meet the available road-space. This notion is confirmed by Dr Tammam Nakkash, a leading expert and transport engineer:
“Any improvement in traffic will attract more cars, so you have to think more globally. You have to provide the needs of the people for transportation. You manage traffic problems; you don’t solve them. Any time you do something good on easing up congestion, you are inviting people to use their cars more.”
Not only is this counter-productive for those combating traffic jams, but such policies keep up locked into a culture that over-privileges the car.
“I hate my car, because I hate to drive and find a parking spot, and I hate how other people drive,” says urban planner and member of the Dictaphone Group, Abir Saksouk-Sasso. “I would much rather have public transport.”
For Saksouk-Sasso, the lack of public transport is part of the degradation of all things public in Lebanon. In their statement about their ‘Bus Cemetery’ installation, Dictaphone, who combine art and research to address political issues, argue that “the lack of public transport in Lebanon and its ‘death’ in our city [is] an extension of the lack of public spaces such as beaches, parks and pavements.” From one side, the country is splintered into tightly-controlled, privately-owned public spaces, like Downtown or Zaytuna Bay. What public space remains is, in the eyes many, chaotic, unpredictable and hence, threatening.
During ‘Public Transportation, Public Concern,’ Dr Nakkash presented his pre-requisites for revitalizing mass transit in Lebanon, arguing that policy-makers today are split into two camps: those who think the problem can be solved by buying new buses, and those who think that the sector as a whole is just a burden on the state. Both camps are wrong.
Nakkash pointed out that what is needed is holistic “transport thinking,” which requires more than just a positive feeling towards busses and shared taxis. In order. “You cannot run a country without governance,” he insisted in an interview with The Outlook, adding:
“After the war, when the time was right for real reform, it wasn’t properly handled. We thought the performance of the government was really lousy and we could do without it.”
“We can do without the state driving buses, but we cannot neglect that the state has the role of regulating. If you don’t have this regulatory body, the private sector can operate in the way it’s operating now: it’s laissez-faire at its worst.”
One problem in how the state is currently managing this sector that Nakkash highlights, is the fragmentation of authority. Red license plates are issued by the Ministry of Interior, while the sector is supposed to be overseen by Ministry of Public Services and Transport. An accord of coordination between the two was only signed recently.
More fundamentally, a shift in how the state allocates funding is necessary. Right now, our national budget is planned year by year, but developing a public transport system requires long-term planning, making reforming our public finance system of utmost importance.
This may require in a change in legislation. Currently, Lebanese law prevents taxes from being allocated to specific projects. In other words, all the income generated by the Lebanese government goes into one pot, so parking fines cannot be dedicated to maintaining roads, for example. Hence, every time a project requires funding, the government, using the “Loi” program, passes a new law in order to fund it. As way of example, “Law 246 was written for building motorways,” Nakkash explains. But “the money in this fund is depleted. The law has to be renewed every 10 years, and [although] it was extended, the 2012 budget did not include allocations for it.” The solution is the creation of a dedicated body for the management and funding of transport projects.
A shift in governance also requires investors to think differently about the purpose of infrastructure. “Transportation projects are not the fastest way to have a good return of investment,” says Eric Huot, who is involved in a proposed tramway between Jounieh and Beirut, so “projects have to be pushed by the idea: they’re needed for the development of a country, to improve access to employment and education. This idea has to be accepted in the population as well.”
According to Huot, projects like the tramway he is working on are important because they deal with the most pressing issue, short-distance commuting in and out of Beirut, while reducing car dependence. “Beirut doesn’t manage to absorb the entrant traffic,” he argues, “and the tramway will offer much higher capacity, up to 12,000 - 15,000 travelers per hour, than what the use of railroad can offer. So the global capacity will increase while the congestion in Beirut will be decreasing.”
To ensure a shift away from car dependence, Huot argues, the connections between different modes of transport is an important question, because “once you start a trip with a car, it’s usually hard to switch to another mode.” Hence, the “stops have to be well connected to bus network in order to make the tramway a good transport system, which is not an easy task in the current situation of transportation in Beirut. That applies for stations in Beirut, but also along the path since it is located along the coast while most populations live in the mountains.”
These complications will require some imaginative solutions from transport engineers; “one could even imagine connections in the future with telepherics or such systems,” says Huot, given Lebanon’s hilly geography. Yet, an even more fundamental leap of imagination is required of us all: the belief in changing the course of history.
In a recent interview published by Mashallah, Safar Barlik, a musician who makes gentle, nostalgic soundscapes, admitted that:
“As many others, I do have a longing for a period I have not lived in. It seems like it was a better time, it does not necessarily mean it was, but when you look at the current post-civil war Lebanese situation, that past seemed like a much more habitable time. We had not exploited every inch of Beirut yet, people could actually walk from place to place. We had a train and a tram, downtown Beirut wasn’t just a piece of concrete put there as a tourist attraction. It seemed like it had more authenticity and cultural depth. I feel that by looking at the past, we also look at our present.”
Can we find the courage to move on?
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