Solutions to address traffic and environmental issues

IELTS Writing Task 2:
Topic:
The most effective way to solve the current traffic and pollution problems in cities is to encourage people to move from the suburbs or the countryside into the city centre.

To what extent do you agree or disagree?

Answer:
Traffic and pollution-related issues have been cited as one of the most complicated issues that require governments to impose strict measures to address. While it is believed that stimulating the influx of rural citizens to the innermost metropolitan areas is the ultimate solution to tackle the described problems above, I completely disagree with this view.

On the one hand, the mentioned scheme above will deteriorate the existing gridlocked rush-hours traffic and pollution-related problems. Indeed, immigration will contribute to explosive growth in the number of city dwellers whose private cars will exert severe pressure on road capacity. Take Bangkok as a prime example, the year-on-year soar in the number of cars stemmed from immigrated rural citizens is exacerbating bottlenecks in the city centre, which forms a lengthy queue of cars at peak hours. Additionally, the migration of rural people to urban areas will exert detrimental impacts on the environment, especially air quality. The demand for car ownership of these people will put air quality at high risks of being severely polluted since the fossil fuels burning of private cars is likely to worsen air pollution, the main contributor to climate change.

On the other hand, motivating rural citizens to urban areas might urge the government to embark on different schemes to enhance traffic infrastructure. In practice, yearly road expansion projects are implemented in developing countries to alleviate traffic congestion as well as traffic collisions triggered by the excessive increase in the number of suburbs citizens whose private cars will overwhelm road capacity. In tandem with this, the government might encourage commuters to use public transports, including sky trains and underground trains once immigration is encouraged, which will mitigate air pollution.

In conclusion, I am not in favour of stimulating people from the countryside as well as suburbs to the innermost urban areas to tackle traffic and pollution-related problems though this scheme might bring about several advantages.

Do not leave your opening paraphrase hanging. You already said that you disagree with the point of view, so the next question is, why? You have 2 sentences in the opening paraphrase to state your supporting reasons as a part of the TA score. So, after you restate the topic and reasons, then providing your measured opinion, tell the examiner why. That way you can immediately use the topic sentences to start your reasoning paragraphs. This will keep the essay short, focused, and clear in discussion to the examiner.

This is not a comparison essay. So you will only receive a score for the paragraphs that support your given opinion. The problem with that is, you will have word deductions for the paragraph that does not support your opinion explanation. This is why I caution students and ask them to avoid using comparative discussions in single opinion essay presentations. If you fall under the minimum word count, after the non-related discussion paragraph is removed, then you risk not getting a passing score in the overall scoring consideration.

Kindly avoid writing long sentences that tend to compress various discussion topics into one sentence. That creates incoherent sentence presentations. Always maximize the 3-5 sentence allowance per paragraph. Using one idea per sentence helps to clarify the discussion and in the process, increase your C&C score as well.