The only way to reduce the amount of traffic in cities today is by reducing the need for people to travel from home to work, education or shopping.To what extend do you agree or disagree?

One of the most conspicuous trends in the 21st century is the rapidly growing population in most cities around the world, posing challenging traffic problems, such as traffic congestion. To cope with this issue, some city planners argue that the only solution is to reduce the necessity for travelling to work, schools, and shopping malls. As far as I am concerned, this argument is not persuasive due to several reasons.

The first reason is that reducing people’s need for travelling is undeniably an impossible task and may cause harm to other activities. The more populous a city is, the more traffic it requires to accommodate its citizens’ wants. For example, when students move from province to Ho Chi Minh City to study at universities, they cannot avoid going to their classes, to the library and other places. Some may argue that such activities as working from home, distance learning and shopping online can relief a significant amount of traffic. They will probably, however, result in more problems, for example, low productivity, social isolation, ineffective study and so on.

Another fact to note is that tackling a large amount of traffic entails a multi-solution strategy rather than a single approach. City planners’ attention is now focusing on developing public transport systems, imposing high tax rate on fuel-consuming vehicles, encouraging the use of bicycles and restricting cars into downtown areas. These solutions, if carried out systematically, will certainly improve cities’ traffic condition.

The discussion above favors a conclusion that reducing people’s need to travel to relief high concentration of traffic in cities is a conventional method. Instead, a combination of solutions has proved to be dramatically successful when dealing with the issue.