The municipality approach in Turkey is based on building roads and then throwing us all into the street and saying “every man for himself.”

I generally read the comments to my columns. Though I don’t like most of them, I read them all. Feedback is good. One comment to my column on Tuesday made me reconsider my argument. Today I would like to share a couple of figures with this perspective.

The comment read: The maintenance work on the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge has reduced the traffic to a single lane. The municipality and the governorate have initiated new measures. TV reporters interview the suffering people. But they generally focus on the problems of private car owners. “No one bothers to talk to people in buses trying to get home who are roasted.” Indeed, the majority take buses, not private cars.

What type of an urbanization approach ignores the problems and the comfort of the majority and opens new roads, underpasses and bridges for the use of the minority that drive their own cars? It is a peculiar story, indeed. The vehicle-dominated urban design has brought us to this point. The majority suffers more. Public transportation is weak, local buses are as hot as hell. If you are in one of them, you roast while you wait for the traffic to move. The municipality approach in Turkey is based on building roads and then throwing us all in the street and saying, “every man for himself.” It is thanks to this vehicle-dominated service approach that everyone is equal, but some are more equal.

There are about 600 million vehicles on the world. This includes automobiles, 4x4 SUVs, and light commercial vehicles. The world’s population, on the other hand, is 7 billion. According to this, those who own vehicles account for 9 percent of the world's population. Given that vehicles owned by public and private sector companies are included on the list and that some people have more than one car, the rate decreases further.

Recently a study on car ownership was released. The summary of the study by Shimelse Ali and Uri Dadush dated June 2012 is accessible on Voxeu. According to this, average household size in Turkey is 4.3 people while the number of passenger cars is 7.5 million. From this angle, a total of 32 million people live in households that have at least one private car. Assuming that half of this figure is able to benefit from the “advantage” of owning a car, around 22 percent of Turkey’s 72 million drive private cars. The remaining 78 percent, therefore, use public transport. But for whom do we design the urban transportation system? We make the system design considering the comfort of the 22 percent, not the 78 percent. We design policies that will please only 22 percent of the population, making the entire population miserable at the end of the day. We confine the 78 percent to hours-long travels in buses as hot as hell and the 22 percent to wait in their relatively comfortable cars until the traffic opens up.

Do you think owning a car is a good thing if the public transportation system is neglected? It definitely isn’t. Yet, we increasingly hear the voice of car owners during prime-time news. They are the ones to whom the microphones are handed. It is impossible to hear the words of the people in buses, who suffer as they travel, packed like sardines. If you live in Istanbul, owning a car only enables you to wait for the end of traffic congestion in an air-conditioned place. The waiting part is given.

Public transportation is good for all. Yet, it is completely neglected in Turkey. The study I mentioned above is accessible at http://bit.ly/Mu0Rld.

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 20.07.2012