Lengthy traffic jams continue to frustrate millions in Istanbul, Türkiye's most populated city, which also has the worst congestion in the country. As residents turn to mass transit, they face new problems, from broken-down buses to malfunctioning metro services.
Murat Kurum, who will face incumbent Ekrem Imamoğlu in the March 31 municipal vote, says the opposition's mayor is solely responsible for the traffic challenges that have plagued Istanbulites in recent months.
Kurum, elected by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party), said in a televised interview on Tuesday that "long lines" of commuters waiting for metro trains or buses had become commonplace. "A mayor should resign, let alone seek a second term, in the face of such a situation," he said.
Metro service suspensions are unusually high in the city, where they provide a lifeline to bypass heavy traffic. Most are linked to technical errors, something critics of the Imamoğlu administration associate with mismanagement. The most recent was last week on the Üsküdar-Çekmeköy metro line on the city's Asian side. Commuters were stranded at stations for hours before the municipality deployed buses to take them between stations. Videos of massive crowds desperately waiting at the stations and bus stops heightened criticism of the municipality on social media.
"People are tired, people are fed up. They fed up with spending three hours under rainfall stuck in traffic," he said. "You can't go home for hours. (The mayor) should admit his fault that he did nothing to end this situation in his five years in office," he said.
Critics also accuse Imamoğlu of a string of failures stemming from lingering problems in mass transportation, such as vehicles not properly maintained, leading to delays in bus schedules. He is also under fire for not helming crisis management in the city during times of chaos, such as a massive snowstorm in the past years and floods.
As he launched his election campaign in January, Kurum pledged an Istanbul that "transports people" when Istanbulites annually "lose 288 hours in traffic, whose rate surged to 64% since 2019."
If he wins, the AK Party candidate will expand the city's highways to 48% and railways to 48% by 2034, easing the congestion on main routes and reducing the average commuting time from 64 to 34 minutes. Istanbul's metro network, too, would be extended from its current 328 kilometers (204 miles) to 650 kilometers by 2029 and ultimately 1,004 kilometers by 2034. Kurum is also looking to remove two major bus terminals to the peripheries of Istanbul to ease intracity traffic, extend the Metrobus line system that stretches from far-flung Beylikdüzü on the European side to Kadıköy on the Asian side and construct a parking lot that can accommodate up to 250,000 vehicles, with a 25% discount on fees.
In Tuesday's interview, Kurum also hit out at his rival, who voiced his opposition to Kurum's plan to construct 650,000 new houses in the city. The AK Party candidate included it among his campaign pledges to provide safe, affordable housing in the city that faces the risk of a major earthquake in the future. He said Imamoğlu's opposition was "unfortunate," especially "since he is a mayor who is supposed to find solutions to people's problems." Kurum's pledge is part of the "urban transformation" project launched by the AK Party-run government, which envisions replacing thousands of unsafe buildings in the face of disaster risks with new ones. The government provides incentives to homeowners, either for the construction of new houses elsewhere or on the site of buildings demolished for the project. The issue is under the spotlight after the February 2023 earthquakes that devastated hundreds of buildings in southeastern Türkiye. Istanbul is also at risk of a future earthquake at a magnitude of 7.0 or higher, according to experts.
Kurum highlighted that Imamoğlu misused the municipality funds, such as "wasting TL 350 million for billboards announcing that they ended the practice of wasting the resources of the municipality."
"You could spend this and the TL 550 million you allocated for concerts to resolving people's transportation problems, such as neighborhoods in the Tuzla district that do not have public bus service. You could launch a bus line for another neighborhood in Kartal where there is none. You could relaunch bus services to Arnavutköy district, or at least you could replace those burning metro buses with new ones," he said, referring to a string of fires in the city's bus rapid transit service in the past five years.
