EMBARQ Meeting

On Wednesday, March 4^th Saehoon, Tulay and I met with EMBARQ Turkey, a non-profit organization for sustainable transportation.  The meeting was informal and the three women who met with us were very candid.  Although the organization focuses on “pedestrinization” and bike-ability of areas in Istanbul, the conversation rapidly turned to the larger problems of Istanbul’s transportation system.  They blame immigration, the consequent sprawl, the mega-projects and the urban transformation law for the issues the city faces with mobility.  They said the monorail project was announced only for the elections, but will not actually come to fruition.  Likewise, the BRT was built very quickly because it was an election tool and this is part of the reason it had some many problems at first.  The women admitted though, that transportation has improved in the last ten to fifteen years and that the BRT has helped.  The main problem they had with the Metrobus system is the accessibility, which I had noticed in the morning when Jyra and I had to spend ten minutes walking from the station just to get to the beginning of a block of buildings.  In addition to the long distances, they cited the narrow walkways, narrow stations and the placement in the middle of the highway as accessibility issues.  The narrowness makes the BRT stations too congested and the highway placement is the reason for the poor placement of the stops in relation to destinations.  While this latter point makes sense, I was still surprised by the complaint about the BRT being in the middle of the highway.  Even though Istanbul’s is the only one in the world currently placed as such, I know that Houston’s BRT considerations have the system similarly placed as the wide shoulders on our highways could be converted relatively easily.  With this prior knowledge I thought it logical to have the system in the middle of the highway.  Finally, the women mentioned that the BRT is not handicap accessible.  To me, this was almost amusing given that the entirety of Istanbul seems handicap inaccessible due to the hills, general danger of crossing the street, and the similar inaccessibility of the tram and regular buses.  Overall, the meeting was very interesting and I was glad they were more open to discussing the problems of the system, especially compared to some of the responses from Istanbul Ulasim we heard the following day.