Sample Essay – 51

In many cities of the world, the traffic on the streets has increased many folds in recent years. Some people think that this problem can only be solved by increasing petrol prices.To what extent do you agree or disagree?
Sample Answer – 1 (Bands : 6.0)
By : Kuljit Dhaliwal
Traffic congestion is a burning issue worldwide. As more and more people achieve financial independence and buy personal cars, vehicular traffic on the already strained city roads worsens, To discourage more and more people from buying cars and adding to the problem, Some suggest increasing petrol prices. However, I disagree with this viewpoint; As I think their are more viable alternative solutions.

Driving as a mode of transport is freeing, more flexible and in most cases less time consuming. Artificially increasing petrol prices through taxes, will hurt individuals and businesses; who prefer and often depend on vehicles due to these benefits. Not to mention, taxes often prove to be an ineffective measure to disincentivize usage, just as seen in data from taxes on alcohol and tobacco.

To counter, other options like mixed planned cities with designated space for retail in residential areas could reduce the need of commuting. Cities could also be designed or even modified with ample walkways and bike lanes. More innovative ideas such as drone delivery, smaller single person smart cars or simply ambitious public transport options such as mono-rail seem like better alternatives to me.

In conclusion, I believe there are more consquences than positives of imposing more taxes on gas like sacrifice of freedom and flexibility in mobility. When more viable options such as mixed cities, mono rail etc already exist.

Answer : 2

Nowadays, traffic congestion has become a grave problem. For many people, charging a higher price for fuel utilization is the best technique to overcome the problem of traffic. While, others opine that some other measures should be developed to alleviate such problem. From my perspective, there are numerous other steps which should be taken to tackle this wide spread traffic on the roads.

To begin with, government should encourage the people for excessive use of public transport. For this purpose, they have to facilitate accessible public transport at reasonable prices and round-the – clock. What it means is that public transport authorities have the obligation to provide public transport with all comfortable facilities for all the passengers. This will lead to drop the adoption of private vehicles which would be a win –win situation for environment and traffic control as well.

Secondly, other initiatives must be taken by government in order to eliminate the traffic jams on the roads such as: imposing tolls along the motorways, which enables the people to depend on public appliances more. Furthermore, car parking fares in the urban areas should be uplifted to control the congestion instead of imposing higher prices on fuel consumption. Thirdly, media should create awareness among people for the adoption of car pooling which means that when two or more people from a block of one flat should be motivate to use one car for each day, which would help to control the traffic at large scale.

To sum up, implementing higher charges on fuel consumption is not appropriate attempt to manage the traffic congestion. There are several other effective steps which should be taken by government , such as: imposing higher prices on tolls and car parking areas, build up the facilities to promote the major use of public transport and so on.

Bands: 6.0

By: Harmanpreet Kaur

Answer : 3

Most of the metro-cities are currently going through the problem of increasing number of vehicles on the roads. Some individuals claim that higher fuel rates can curb this problem. I am convinced that this notion is flawed, because it will give birth to a lot more new issues.

To begin with, making the petrol more expensive can only stop people from using the moter-cars who belong to the average earning group. However, for rich people, high prices of the petrol will not bring any change in their habit of buying and driving of cars. For instance, people who come from high earning class buy and drive the luxury cars for their passion and expensive fuel will not be able to stop them. Moreover, pricey fuel can have adverse effect on the public transit users, because it will increase the fare prices also and decrease the number of passengers as well as people rather buy their own cars than travel by public transport. So, this trend will make the current situation even more worse.

Apart from this, most of the countries are already facing the inflation and if the fuel price go higher, it will make hard to control inflation, which will also become an obstacle in the way of developing countries to become developed countries. For example, countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh will not able to bear the expensive prices of oil market. In addition to this, the oil producing countries can get the monopoly over the oil marketing, which will lead the world economy to the destructive way and crash the international stock market.

To conclude, all the existing reasons has provided the concrete foundation that increasing fuel prices is not a key to solve the issue of increasing traffic jams on the roads. There is need for some other strong ideas to tackle this problem.

Bands: 6.5

By: Rajdeep Kaur