World Sustainable Transport Day is an annual event observed on November 26 to promote safe, affordable, and sustainable transport systems, which strives to acknowledge the significance of accessible, affordable, and safe transportation for increased cross-border trade, social welfare, economic growth, and environmental advantages. For Pakistanis, switching from automobiles to more environmentally friendly modes of transportation is more than simply a means to save time and trouble. The survival of the economy and the environment now depend on this. The cost of maintaining one’s own four-wheel drive or even two-wheel drive is simply too high for the majority of people in Pakistan due to rising gas costs and general increases in living expenses and taxes. Then there is the fact that several of our main cities have risen to the top of the world pollution rankings due to their contaminated air; this issue gets worse when the haze decreases. Vehicle emissions are not the only cause of this issue, but they play a significant role.
This is made worse by the fact that the nation’s impoverished consumers frequently have to choose older cars with lower emissions regulations. Addressing the sustainable transportation gap is essentially becoming a matter of life or death because all of this pollution is reducing the average life expectancy of the nation by up to four years. Although cities like Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad-Rawalpindi have been attempting to move toward mass transit, there are currently too few options available, and regulatory obstacles frequently impede growth. As an illustration, consider how “procedural violations” caused the construction of the Green Line Bus Rapid Transit extension in Karachi to be unexpectedly stopped in September. This stoppage came just a few weeks after work had resumed on the extension following a nine-year-long suspension. Large mass transit projects cannot succeed under such stop-start administration, even though work on the BRT Green Line has begun this week. In Lahore, these initiatives have perhaps performed better, but the city’s smog issue still exists. In an effort to combat smog, the Punjab government banned large cars and subpar buses from all public and private schools, colleges, universities, and hospitals on Monday.
This suggests that even in a city that has achieved comparatively considerable headway on public transit systems, there is still a widespread reliance on inferior automobiles. Political factors also play a role in this issue. The local governments that ought to be spearheading the transition to a more sustainable transportation system are also the nation’s least powerful political organizations. Therefore, even while planning and funding mass transportation initiatives or electric buses are difficult tasks in and of themselves, they are only a portion of the issue. And the longer we put off the sustainable transition, the more powerful they will grow. As our cities continue to become larger and more disorganized, organized mass transit may eventually become unfeasible.

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