Urban landscaping: ‘Bus project bad for ICT environment’

Wattoo says a bus lane would have ‘served the purpose’.

LAHORE:

The Islamabad-Rawalpindi metro bus project could be a big disaster for the environment, Pakistan Peoples Party leader Manzoor Wattoo said on Tuesday.

In a statement, Wattoo said the project demonstrated flaws in the government’s priorities and development strategy. He criticised the chief minister’s “obsession with tearing down these cities’ historical façade” and said development for the sake of improving lives was one thing, but sacrificing historic and cultural sites at the altar of development was different.

He claimed that the metro bus project was expected to cost around Rs24 billion, which he said was “six times the amount projected by an Asian Development Bank study”. The government had not issued any clarification on the matter and its silence was disturbing, he said.

“The dug-up roads made the once-beautiful Islamabad look like a battlefield, he said.Wattoo expressed his frustration over the uprooting of “thousands of trees for the project”. “This reckless deforestation would deface the beautiful federal capital.”

Wattoo said the idea of building new roads for the proposed project was also flawed because there was already enough space to dedicate a lane for buses. That would have dealt with the problems faced by the commuters at a fraction of the cost, he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 28^th, 2014.