Changing India's commute

Car-focused transport policy must end

Urban planners rarely have the luxury of designing a city from scratch. They have mostly to devise incremental changes to plan for a better life in growing urban areas. So looking carefully at how urban Indians actually live at the moment is highly useful; and, for this, the recently released 2011 Census data on how Indians go to work might be essential. The aggregate data are broken up into urban and rural sections, and it is also subdivided with respect to individual states and union territories. This might help devise state-specific solutions. At the aggregate level, the data give an idea of where the country stands (it is a proxy for the level of income and urbanisation) and where it needs to go.

The current paradigm for urban designers is to ensure that more and more people live near their place of work so that a commute can be done either on foot or on a bicycle. The good news is that just over a third of Indian workers do this. Since India also has a high level of road accidents, it is imperative to make more space available for pavements and to create bicycle tracks. Where a motorised journey must be made, the first step forward can be to get more and more people on to electric two-wheelers. Over 12 per cent of Indians currently go to work on motorised, fossil fuel-driven two-wheelers. These have two pluses. They minimise both door-to-door journey time and cost and take up little road space. To make it a win-win situation, policy should encourage the development and production of electric two-wheelers to address urban automobile pollution. China has already done this; there are now close to 150 million electric two-wheelers on its urban roads.

One solution which has no immediate future is commuting by rail - even though a metro rail is on just about every Indian town's wish list. Currently, just over three per cent of workers commute by train. The low base and huge capital costs of setting up metro rail thus make it imperative to look elsewhere for mass transport solutions, which will make a dent in the foreseeable future. This should lead policy makers to consider buses, which account for just over 11 per cent of workers' commutes - a figure that can and should go up several times. Bus transport offers the most cost-effective of passenger trips, particularly if the cost of road space is included. Though bus transport is more polluting than metro rail, here also a shift from buses powered by compressed natural gas to electric ones can make a huge difference. Policy must, therefore, encourage the development and production of electric buses.

The most insignificant form of transport for workers is cars. These account for under three per cent of trips but are shockingly inefficient. They take up an inordinate and unjustifiable amount of road space, creating not just traffic jams but also contributing hugely to urban air pollution. Pollution caused by trucks unnecessarily trundling through cities where they are not eventually headed, as in the case of Delhi, can be eliminated by constructing a ring road; but pollution levels would likely bounce back soon, fuelled by more cars coming onto city roads. The only long-term solution is to prioritise buses over cars. But that central challenge is one which policy makers neither seem to understand nor are willing to address.