By Doriana Musai
I was discussing traffic with a friend of mine, and while talking I drew a diagram of traffic in Tirana on Bllok.
Tirana has been a monocentric city, at least since 1939. All plans and projects have emphasized this monocentricity of the metropolis's form.
But situated between two river valleys, the Erzen and the Tirana River – one to the north and the other to the southwest – a drainage canal for sewage and rainwater (Lana), a hill range to the southwest and a mountain range to the southeast, the city seems encapsulated as if under a vice.
This form of the territory, after the post-communist social "explosion" and both directed and spontaneous movements of the population towards the north of Tirana, deformed the city, taking it out of the monocentrism of rigid fascist and communist plans.
This organic sprawl – where the only design law was the territory, its composition and form – caused a thousand and one social, economic and political problems.
And as if inseparable from the question of why there is traffic in Tirana, today there are settlements that affect not only the suburbs, but the entire city.
Paskuqani, in particular, once a neighborhood of the Tirana municipality, has now been passed on to the Kamëz municipality as an unwanted appendix.
This disconnection of the upper informal neighborhood from Tirana is part of the problem of traffic in the city today.
A decision not to connect it with the New Boulevard has not only closed Paskuqani's direct access to the capital, even though it is adjacent to it, but has denied Tirana a gateway to access northern Albania - a direct exit to the airport.
Not only that, but the shape of the territory where the city will continue to develop is larger than the small ring of Tirana and goes like a horseshoe towards the Adriatic. Tirana has long since surpassed the city, the district or the region. The metropolis as we like to call it, even though we still don't have a metro, has a regional impact.
And what's sadder, it's a lost opportunity for a city that circulates its commercial activity, economic flows, people, schools, hospitals, only through one gate - which, no matter how many underpasses or overpasses you make, remains too narrow for the flows that Tirana moves with, especially the one with +12 million tourists.
A capital that claims to compete with its sisters in Europe, still has the sewage canal open in the middle of the city, - just like in 1930 when it was built. 100 years of no evolution in that direction. We cover it with trees so that we don't see it, and even say: how beautiful Lana is now in autumn, forgetting for a moment that we are standing on the canal where it is heading towards the Adriatic - fixed on Cape Rodoni - in the city.
Traffic solutions are provided, written, and validated by researchers and professionals. They are published. They are online. They are free to access.
Today there is traffic in Tirana because there is no political will to solve it.
