The Illusion of Scope

The Illusion of Scope

We live in a society where too many rumours become facts, too many sounds become voices and too many likes become happiness. All you have to do is pitch anything wrong or right as many times as possible until it becomes a universal truth.

So I heard people saying that there is no scope of traffic engineering in Pakistan. Most of these people are my personal contacts, my juniors, my mates etc. When I ask them, “what is traffic engineering?” they often reply:

•         The counting of vehicles
•         Vehicular traffic study
•         Traffic impact studies
•         Vehicle congestion study etc.

Then after hearing all this with immense patience from these social media philosophers, I ask:

• Who will decide how many visitors a theme park should receive after its construction?
• Who will decide how many lifts a building should have for smooth operations?
• Who will decide the paths of pedestrians?
• Who will decide the cargo movement patterns?
• Who will finalize the operations of railways and airports? (number of trains, bogies, frequency)
• Who will decide the demand and supply of dry ports?
• Who will synchronize the city?
• Don’t you think that there is a requirement of capacity analysis of sea channels and corridors?

This gives their weak stomach a food for thought. Then with a pause, I say, every object that may move from one recognised origin to another recognised destination comes under the traffic engineer’s scope. Weather it is the traffic of containers in the container yard, traffic of visitors in the shopping mall lift, queue analysis of a roller coaster ticket holders, busyness of runways or the vehicular traffic engineering.

Then the argument expands with its extreme irrationality, they say no one wants to accept that, they design town cities without consulting a traffic engineer, there is nothing we can do. Then I conclude the argument with two points. One is, even you never knew all this, how can they know? And as a second point I tell them a story I like, once told by my teacher (Mr. Tahseen).

One day a shoe maker was transferred to a village, he resigned the next day with an argument that, company wants to sink my career because in this village “no one wear shoes”.

They accepted the resignation and send another shoe maker to that village, next day he ordered 100,000 shoe pairs with an argument that this is an amazing venue give me 100,000 shoe pairs immediately because here in this village “no one is wearing shoes”

Illusion of Scope or Massive Scope, assume again!