Browsing through Kathmandu after Tika Thursday evening, I realized  something. Our city’s roads are seriously under capable of handling the traffic that runs on it. Of course the hints have been there for a long time and it’s not as if it was a revelation, but when I was on the backseat of a jam in Chabel that evening I knew just how bad the situation is. There were a few public micros and tempos along with the occasional bus that was milling through the roads that evening.

Besides that it was just a horde of private cars, taxis and motorcycles competing for road space, jostling amongst each other and while the bikes as always found the thinnest openings and the ever useful side walks to get through, the rest of us (I was in a tempo) were left with the eternal honking and waiting.

Now I didn’t think there were enough private cars and taxis in Kathmandu to jam a certain intersection for about ten minutes in a breezy and certainly spacious Tika evening in the capital. It brought me back to an old dilemma I have been having, of buying a private motorcycle or sticking with the public arrangement.

Being a freelancer and volunteer of many sorts I have no fixed place in the city and run around from this place to that around a labyrinthine of awkward routes. Sometimes this is not much of a nuisance, but many other times the whole process of travelling in public vehicles just exhausts me.

This is more pointed when in the evening I have to compete with a ruthless crowd of home bound travelers for a seat that almost never happens. The result is bending one’s body in hundred places, standing up on the little micros or freewheeling on the doors, while hanging on to life with a tired arm clutching on some piece of support somewhere.

To top it off are the office hour jams when you are confused whether to walk home or stay on the inching vehicle (and just about when I decide on the former the micro moves a slow inch or two and there it goes again). So its frustrating. This is when I most dearly want some sort of a private transportation.

But in the back of my conscience again, I know I will just be adding on to the pot holed, over used and tired old roads of the city: I will be part of the ever growing traffic of the capital. This tug of luxury versus conscience has been happening to me for about two years now, in different degrees and forms.

I read in the paper a few days back that they were bringing double deckers to our transportation system, with the good old Sajha Yatayat coming back into the game with the same. There were also preliminary talks of a metro being installed at some point of time.

I hope those plans jump out of the papers soon enough, because god knows we need it. It is just exasperating sometimes, how our public transport is running and the second and third hand roads that run through the city’s heart truly need a break. If we are not expanding those spaces, then we need to utilize the heights and the depths of them, and fast.

Chiya-Pasaley loves tea and writes about conversations that originate along the hours spent on drinking many cups of it. Besides that he is curious about many things and especially the rural-urban divide, and the coming of modernization to Nepal. He writes on the mundane and the very fantastic, and everything in between.