[sustran] Re: Engineering the future of transport in Indian cities

[Anupam Gupta, CLSA]

Hi Eric - Thanks very much for the detailed reply, it was quite helpful.
 
Unfortunately I'm not an urban traffic/planning expert and much as I would
want to , I don't think I'm adequately qualified to join the New Mobility
briefs organisation. 
 
The one point I did want to make to this discussion was that in Mumbai,
infrastructure development is more about politics than about real
development and hence the interests of the city come last in the list. In
the light of this unfortunate fact, I think we're quite behind the curve in
terms of new mobility ideas. 
 
You'd know that in Mumbai, transport is looked at by no less than 5 agencies
- MMRDA (in charge of the road and rail development and almost all new
infrastructure projects), BMC (the civic authorities in charge of
maintenance of roads, sewerage, etc), BEST (in charge of buses), Railways
(local trains) and MSRDC (in charge of the BWSL and the upcoming
Transharbour Link). 
 
Almost all of them are pulled, pushed and manipluated by politicians and
political parties. The city hence bears the brunt for short-sighted planning
by people who are transferred every five years from their job. I don't think
we can even start to think of qualified experts at the helm of affairs of
Mumbai's crumbling infratstructure. All we have is a slap-dash bunch of
Keystone Kops. 
 
To that extent I completely agree with you in your response to Sunny.
Indeed, all transport advisers are not created equal or equally balanced.
And with all due respect, "..if proper consideration of all the stakeholders
is taken into account.." sounds like wishful thinking to me when I think of
Mumbai.
 
Do forgive me if what I've said came out as a rant. I look forward to
learning more from this wonderful group. Thanks once again. 
 
Regards
Anupam

-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Britton [mailto:eric.britton at ecoplan.org] 
Sent: 13 September, 2006 2:17 PM
To: Sustran-discuss at jca.apc.org
Cc: anupam.gupta at clsa.com; sksunny at gmail.com
Subject: Engineering the future of transport in Indian cities



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
<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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