Managing urban transit in a city of migration

Cities and Memory - remixing the world

What does urban sprawl sound like in a traffic-choked city? This recording is of a street intersection in a residential part of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The whistle is from a policeman who has been instructed to stand amidst the traffic so as to over-ride the traffic lights, because the traffic lights can't deal with the volume of urban traffic.
Bishkek is typical of many cities, in experiencing both a dramatic increase in population (from 600,000 at the end of the Soviet Union to an estimated 1.5 million today) and a huge increase in the number of private cars, the result of rural to urban migration and the growth of peri-urban migrant districts.
The result is that 'probki' (traffic jams) are a constant of city life and 'traffic chaos' a constant topic of conversations. Attempts to encourage the public to switch to public transport have been hindered by botched reforms, an insufficient number of buses, and the wide distances that people have to cover to get to the city proper.
Recorded by Madeleine Reeves.
Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world’s first collection of the sounds of human migration.
For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration
IMAGE: Vmenkov, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons