Imagining the Lahore canal without its trees…

Officials at TEPA are both imagining it - and adamant about creating it. The reasons: growing traffic and an underdeveloped public transport system.
The Lahore canal is the link artery of the city's traffic. It remains the most straightforward route to any of the cities main residential and commercial hubs. The entire length of the city is divided by the canal.
But is it only the convenience that draws a commuter to the canal - and not the urban callosity known to be the Lahore Ring Road. It is a question worth pondering.
The answer is provided by the many who travel its span, walk by its side, take a dip in its waters and celebrate the 'being' of the city of Lahore - amidst the nostalgic longings and insight into the contemporary offered by the canal.
The trees offer the longest shaded road in the city. It only requires a moment here to relax and think, “Why is the canal the only road that offers a homely feeling?”
The road, part of the menacing mentality to social space offered by urbanisation, is impersonal, disconnected, barren... In so many ways, the ‘offered’ road has no aesthetic power. Asphalt, tar... the materials that make it also express it’s meaning to the commuter and the pedestrian. Where is the Lahore canal road amidst this? The only road that offers solace…
The urban menace can be tamed, the road says. There can be something personal in the necessary impersonal. There can be something to be treasured in the urban expanse. “I am that something,” it says to the city dweller.
It is often downplayed how essential the trees of the canal are. To answer that question put yourself through this experience:
Drive out the Jail Road Underpass and feel the canal once the road closes to a two-lane. As the Mall Road Underpass approaches feel the road again.
The more eccentric amongst you should write the feeling down and then reflect: would you like the same feeling every time you journey on the road?
TEPA thinks the way the old urban developer did. The old urban developer was concerned with efficiency. Efficiency would be a product of thinking the least. Thus the easy way - the TEPA's way - has been to think of the canal road in terms of the number of lanes versus traffic volume ratio. In its' imagination the only way to go for traffic volume is: UP. Thus, in response, the only way it sees for the number of lanes is: UP.
This is blatantly apparent in the self-contradictory projections in the 3-lane carriageway plans of TEPA, available with Pakistan Today, which project a worse congestion situation on the 3-lane carriageway in 2015, than in the current dual-carriageway. And 2015 is nothing in comparison with the projected catastrophic year of 2020. The projections of TEPA self contradict indeed…
Thus, forgetting the language of the aesthetic, and speaking the language of the urban developer - or TEPA itself - an expansion of the canal road to 3-lanes is a project destined to fail.
Thus - while it is necessary to re-imagine the canal in a different way to make both traffic and its feel more humane - imagining the canal without its' trees, TEPA itself claims, is not the way out. What to say of us then, lay-non-developmental-thinkers?

- The article was printed in the Lahore pages of Pakistan Today on 14th March 2011.