Natural behavioural tendency shape the geographical settlement pattern

Oct 07, 2020 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,

There are a few in the public who appear to be somewhat misguided. They have long held the view that the Demerara Harbour Bridge is the main cause of traffic jams from its junction with the East Bank Public Road to the downtown Georgetown business district. They are further encouraged to think that the current plan for the bridge to overpass the junction and deposit its traffic at alternate entry points to the city will alleviate the problem. The truth, however, is that the congestion is actually the result of city roads being inadequate for the volume of traffic entering them from all directions. The proposed fly-over will make no difference. But if, in the long run, this traffic can find alternate destinations, the problems would go away with them.
At least two worrisome situations will be diminished – scenic degradation and man-hour loss, items that seem to have been high on the agenda when sugar was king. A network of tree-lined streets, avenues, and canals provided access to fixed acreages of commercial, residential, institutional, recreational and parkland uses. A lone road along the waterfront ran into the cane fields. Over the years, however, this orderly design was interrupted by development pressures that led to a de facto abandonment of established land use control practices and as a result, the once visitor-friendly Garden City of the Caribbean became a more populous but less desirable destination. Symptoms of the apparent breakdown of environmental control include the juxtaposition of conflicting uses, traffic jams/lost man-hours, damaged roads, and the ubiquitous litter. Thus, in a nutshell, was created Georgetown’s version of the tragedy of the commons.
When city fathers attempted to cut the traffic to fit the available space, their procrustean plan ran into a brick wall of self-interest erected by storefront operators and vocal sidewalk vendors profiting from the sale of merchandise to throngs of stomping pedestrians. Meanwhile, both man-hour loss and litter keep piling up. Although culturally dismissed as normal, the former is staggering when calculated on the basis of each of thousands of workers sitting idle for two hours each day. But these problems would be abated if segments of the commercial sector would just leave town.
But they will not quit a profitable spot for the sake of the public good. There must be a substitute with good marketing prospects where they can set up some sort of specialized shop that would also attract providers of ancillary goods and services, thereby absorbing man-hours that would have been lost, while also allowing the garden room to bloom again. But that spot must be within easy reach.
This need for proximity (easy reach) is a natural behavioural tendency that determines where people go to most often to shop and how their actions, consequently, shape the geographical settlement pattern. Studies show that on open landscapes where walking and horseback were the dominant modes of travel, the natural tendency to take the shortest possible route resulted in settlements being evenly distributed in close proximity to each other thereby establishing a cost effective system of ingress and egress that was beneficial to all participants.
Towards this end, a rapid transit system that is being proposed by government will attract a number of centers into a sprawling market circuit and within easy reach of each other. This higher level of resource leveraging will, unlike the lone road on which subsistence farming tagged along behind sugar, stimulate inter-community trade and subsequent regional economic development. Commercial uses will thus be motivated to exit the city and participate in the trading opportunities thus presented.
Timehri is an example of one such site. Anecdotes of its potential include:
a. A deep-water harbour and significant sunk airport capital as magnets to operators in the emerging oil and gas industry.
b. Its proximity to customers in its catchment basin.
c. The language learning potential of the nearby Kuru Kuru Cooperative College.
d. The nearby recreational facilities carved out of pristine forest and wetland.
e. Its dense tree cover as an opportunity for the creation of a model eco-city.
f. Its location as a specialized import/export agri-marketing center.
g. Its cultural heritage consisting of: Timehri Center applied to the vicinity; Chinese ancestral lands on the Kamuni Creek; Borselen Island, a former capital during the Dutch period.
A Timehri Center specializing in agri/forestry import/export, for example, would leverage resources in its adjacent hinterlands. The eventual impact of this arrangement would be the saving of man-hours from congestion, and their utilization in actual production, thereby encouraging societal change in the value of time. It would also reduce the pressure on land use management to ignore measures designed to preserve scenic/environmental quality.
Summary
The bridge is no part of the congestion in the city, but part of the solution. The genesis of this problem is the inadequacy of the transportation system laid down some 200 years ago. The network of streets within the city and the road out of it, have today collapsed under the weight of a fast growing traffic. The collapse is most noticeable at the bridge because, while traffic from the east uses various entry points, the bridge junction is the entrance for traffic from the thickly populated East Bank, West Bank, and the West Coast.
To reduce this congestion, traffic must be diverted elsewhere. But there is hardly any such place since all available lands had been monopolized for sugar and the single road too inadequate for making more lands available because it ignores the fact that the country’s resources are widely distributed across the landscape, and provides no branches for easy access to them.
A rapid transit system will facilitate the emergence of marketing centers across the country, an outcome that is likely because commercial uses tend to follow crowds and crowds tend to follow good roads. The proposed system will therefore help foster the development of well populated distribution centers within easy reach of each other, a proximity that will elicit trade between them and which, (since no community can develop by trading with itself), will drive development of the wider economy. When in place, this expanded architecture, which will include the bridge, will help relieve congestion in the city, and also restore the picturesque garden.

Fitzroy Collins

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