[sustran] Engineering the future of transport in Indian cities

[Eric Britton]

Dear Anupam,

 

Thanks for asking. Here is my thinking on this.

 

Wilbur Smith is an old mainline transportation engineering consultancy with lots
of notable work in support of road development in many places, between, in and
right through the middle of our cities in many places. It was among the leading
engineering consultancy firms in the States as we decided to reorganize our
cities for cars rather than people starting already in the fifties.  As Dr.
Freud pointed out, they are every good at what they do. They, if you will,
"supply the market", and in this regard are in my view a prime example of what I
and others call 'old mobility' thinking (see our page on this from the New
Mobility Advisory/Briefs at - http://newmobilitybriefs.org clicking The
Challenge/Old Moblity on the left menu). . You can check them out at
http://www.wilbursmith.com/index.cfm. 

 

Now they do of late have some capabilities in non-motorized planning (you can
check that out on their site), but that is I believe because there is a market
there. Their main allegiance shown many times over is to infrastructure
creation.  Love it or leave it.

 

You see dear Sustran friends, and as we have seen many times here, the world of
real interest in and decision making in transport in cities is really divided
into two not at all equal groups. There are those who are most comfortably
installed and where the money is. And then there are what we call in our work
the 'Principal Voices of Sustainable Transport". This latter group is a small
minority but is taking form and, I am confident, are going to start to become a
powerful source of new ideas and initiatives in the sector. If you go to our
Briefs site given above and click the International Advisory Council you will
see close to two hundred of them who are leading the charge. (And maybe you
should be there too Anupam?)

 

And while I have the podium here, I would also like to comment on Sunny's
observation in a note which arrived as I was penning this one. He says: "It does
not matter who is the planner let them be from America or from India itself but
if proper consideration of all the stakeholders is taken into account we can
surely expect an equitable and sustainable transport for our Indian cities."

 

Dear Sunny. I could not disagree more strenuously. All transport policy advisers
are not created either equal or equally balanced. You go with a firm like WS and
believe me they and the interests who are closely allied to their traditional
forecast-and-build agenda will end up exactly where they want to go. I promise!

 

*     *     *

 

Okay, fair enough. But it is not enough to be lucid and even right - if one is
serous about all this one also should try to be effective. What difference does
it make if a couple of dozen Sustran heads like us come to some sort of broad
intellectual agreement that this is probably a lousy decision and action plan. I
ask you: what can be done to come up with something better than will win the
day? 

 

After all the combine populations of Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad,
Chennai and Kolkata is more than 60 million honest hard working people who
deserve a fair break  Or do we just turn to the sports pages and keep reading?

 

Eric Britton 

 

PS. Anupam, you point to WS's  work done in Bombay in the sixties. Makes me
think that someone should sit down and make a list of every WS contract in the
Global South of the last fifty years, and give some kind of feel for what they
have done. I am afraid this will be a quite long list and that if one were to
summarize the impact of their recommendations there might be there some food for
thought.

 

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