[sustran] Alternatives to the Automobile in the Indian City

[Vinay Baindur]

http://www.epw.in/commentary/alternatives-automobile-indian-city.html


Alternatives to the Automobile in the Indian City
Vol - XLVIII No. 47, November 23, 2013 | Henrik
Valeur<http://www.epw.in/authors/henrik-valeur>


   - Commentary <http://www.epw.in/commentary>



While automobiles contribute significantly to pollution and environmental
degradation, and affect human health, the authorities who are supposed to
understand the gravity and the urgency of the problem pay no attention to
the alternatives. Two cases presented in this article demonstrate that
activists and experts, even high court judges, cannot change the situation,
if the authorities do not want to play ball.

Henrik Valeur (hv at uid.dk) is a Danish-born architect-urbanist, an
independent researcher, founder and creative director of UiD. He has
studied urban mobility in cities around the world and developed several
projects for sustainable urban mobility, including the concept of “green
streets”, the design of the “Bicycle Tower” and a plan to make Sector 19 in
Chandigarh car-free

For the past century, the automobile has captured the imagination of people
around the globe and for many it still constitutes the ultimate symbol of
middle-class status. According to a rapidly-growing number of academic
studies, however, the automobile may have detrimental effects on human
health and life quality, not least in cities where the concentration of
automobiles contribute significantly to pollution, environmental
degradation, social isolation, stress and physical inactivity.1

The following two cases from Bangalore and Chandigarh may not only provide
inspiration for the creation of car-free environments in cities, but also
reveal some of the difficulties in creating those environments.

*IISc Campus*

Bangalore is one of the biggest and fastest-growing cities in India. It is
also home to the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), which was founded by
Jamsetji Tata in the early 20th century. Tata also founded what would later
become India’s largest industrial conglomerate, the Tata Group, which
includes Tata Motors, the manufacturer of Tata buses and Tata trucks, which
are major contributors to road accidents and traffic-related noise and air
pollution in Indian cities.

Ironically, one of the few places in Bangalore where you would not find
these vehicles is on the campus of the IISc. This is a very green campus
with a healthy, honk-free environment. But as with the rest of the city,
the number of cars and two-wheelers are rapidly increasing. To revert this
trend, two different projects have been initiated.

*Bicycle Sharing: *In August 2012, the Namma Cycle2 service was launched at
the IISc campus. The idea was conceived 3-4 years earlier by an informal
group of bicycle enthusiasts, including H R Murali, who had been to Paris
where he had seen the then newly launched *Vélib *(short for “bicycle
freedom” in French) – a highly advanced bicycle sharing system with about
16,000 bicycles and 1,200 bicycle stations scattered across the city.

Initially, the group had thought of launching such a service at the
Electronic City in Bangalore, but due to the chaotic traffic situation and
lack of proper infrastructure, it was deemed unsafe there. Instead, it was
launched at the IISc with a donation of 150 bicycles from the BSA bicycle
manufacturer with the Center for Infrastructure Sustainable Transportation
and Urban Planning acting as the local anchor.

The IISc had previously tried to implement a similar system, using the
bicycles that students would leave behind when they graduated, but without
proper management and maintenance, people would just abandon the bicycles
because of a flat tyre or other technical problems and in no time the
campus was littered with defunct bicycles. Today there are 75 Namma
bicycles operating from five stations located at the busiest points on
campus (the hostels, the canteen and the clusters of department buildings).

There are two ways of using the Namma Cycle service. One is as a registered
user. Registrations can be made at the stations or online and cost Rs 100
per month. As a registered user you may use the bicycles as often as you
like and each time you use one, you get the first half an hour for free. If
you use it for longer periods of time you pay Rs 5 for the next half an
hour, Rs 10 for the next hour, and so on. The other way to use the service
is “pay as you go”. In this option, you start paying Rs 5 for the first
half an hour, Rs 10 for the first hour, and so on.

The progressive payment scheme is intended to encourage people to return
the bicycle as soon as they are no longer using it. When asked about this,
Murali says that the idea of bicycle-sharing is*sharing, not owning*. It is
better to be used by more people since *Namma*, means “ours” in the Kannada
language.

Lavanya Keshavamurthy, another member of the Namma Cycle team, says that, “*the
idea behind getting people to use and return a cycle within 30 minutes at
zero cost, has its roots in our philosophy of holding onto resources only
for the duration that we really need, thus, having enough for everyone with
minimal resources”.*3“Cycling” may thus refer to both bicycling and
recycling.

There are about 3,000 students, faculty members and staff at the IISc, and
just before the summer vacation this year, there were 300 registered users
of the Namma Cycle. The statistics show an upward trend over the past year
in terms of the number of daily trips (from 2-3 trips per bicycle per day
in December last year to around seven trips in May this year). In total,
more than 7,000 trips have been made (by July 2013) by both registered and
non-registered users, and 65% of these trips were of less than half an
hour’s duration.

It is hoped that the number of users and bicycles will steadily increase in
a positive self-reinforcing cycle, but with fees and subscriptions
accounting for only 5% of total revenue, the service is, like similar
services elsewhere, heavily dependent on grants, sponsorships and
advertising from both private and public sources.

The software used for registration and by station managers to keep track of
the bicycles has been developed by Gubbi Labs and is intended as an open
source software that can be used free of charge by similar services in
other places. In fact, the initiative at the IISc can be seen as a pilot
project, which may be implemented in other campuses and/or at a larger
city-scale. But for such a service to work citywide, the authorities need
to provide safe spaces for bicycling.

Bangalore city recently launched another bicycle sharing service with a few
small stations located at the new metro stations, but as there are no safe
bicycle lanes around the stations, and very few bicycle stations in the
city, this service is hardly used at all. The result of implementing such a
service without properly integrating it in the planning and management of
the city may be the opposite of what was intended.

*E-vehicles*

In addition to the Namma Cycle service, the Center for Infrastructure,
Sustainable Transportation and Urban Planning has also made a proposal for
an “e-mobility” service based on extra large electric golf carts that would
shuttle along designated routes on campus.

According to K V Gururaja, a member of the design group, the inspiration
came from similar services at the historical city of Hampi and at the
Infosys’ hi-tech campus in Mysore. The proposal was made in response to
growing concerns over the increasing numbers of motor vehicles entering
campus each day. Today, motor vehicles account for about 50% of all trips
on campus, while walking and bicycling make up the other 50%.

Surveys indicate that even though a significant number of campus trips
(one-third) are made by non-campus residents, who enter through one of the
four main gates of campus, most trips (2 out of 3) are made by campus
residents, between the areas where students’ hostels and staff quarters are
located and certain clusters of department buildings and common facilities
like the canteen and library. Peak hours are indentified in the morning,
around lunch and in the afternoon/evening.

The fact that demand is not equally distributed over space or time
constitutes a classic dilemma of transport planning, and solutions will
often result in either insufficient or excessive capacity. More complex
operation schedules with differentiated frequency for different time slots
and different routes, and integration of the bicycle-sharing service could
help solve this dilemma.

Switching from (private) vehicles running on gasoline or diesel to (public)
vehicles running on electricity would reduce both air and noise pollution
on campus, which would be good, if for no other reason because it would
have a positive effect on students’ learning abilities. It would, however,
not reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions, if the electricity comes from
the national grid because most of the electricity in India is produced by
coal, which makes electrical vehicles potentially even more harmful to the
global environment than traditional motor vehicles. Therefore, it was hoped
that solar panels would be installed on the roofs of the e-vehicles to make
them self-sufficient with low emission electricity.

The aim of the E-Mobility project was to make the campus free of polluting
vehicles within the next few years.4 To achieve this, the E-Mobility and
the Namma Cycle services would have to be seen as complementary rather than
competing services and should ideally be planned and managed by the same
entities. This could yield considerable operational benefits and make the
services more user-friendly, while expanding reach and increasing
connectivity. It could also help solve the capacity dilemma. Bicycles
could, for instance, provide an alternative to e-vehicles during peak hours
and be used to reach locations that are not served by E-Mobility, while the
e-vehicles may be a convenient alternative to the bicycle when it rains or
one is feeling lazy.

Surveys indicate that the majority of potential users are willing to pay
the proposed fare of Rs 5 per trip, which should be enough to cover
operational costs. Capital costs of which the investment in e-vehicles is
by far the largest may be (partly) recuperated through sponsoring and
income from advertising.

Parking facilities for motor vehicles would have to be constructed at the
four main gates of campus, but this would happen in a later phase. In the
first phase a single e-vehicle would be operated to test the system and
provide user feedback.

The planning of the e-mobility routes would obviously have to be adapted to
the existing situation but how these routes were planned would play an
important role in how the campus develops in the future as new facilities
and activities will probably try to locate close to this service.
E-Mobility – if well-planned – could therefore not only help make campus
“greener”, but also help preserve actual green spaces!

Namma Cycle stations and E-Mobility stops would have to be strategically
placed around campus and parking lot should be in the immediate vicinity of
the four main gates of campus. E-vehicles should be solar-powered and a
pollution-free system for deliveries and garbage collection on campus would
have to be invented.

With such an integrated solution, implemented in phases as an ongoing
learning process (appropriate for a university!), the IISc campus could
become a great example of how to create healthy urban environments for
human development! Unfortunately, the plans for E-Mobility, that were
developed by the institute’s own experts, have been trashed by the
authorities of that same institute.

*Car-free Sector 19*

Like Bangalore, Chandigarh used to be called a garden city. It was designed
in the early 1950s by a team of Indian and foreign architects headed by Le
Corbusier, one of the “fathers” of the modernist movement. The city
consists of about 60 sectors, most of which have been planned according to
the same principles of organisation: a market street and a green belt
perpendicular to each other, dividing the sector into four equally large
parts. Commercial activities are located around the market street, while
public institutions and facilities are located around the green belt.
Dwellings are divided into four subcategories located in each of the four
“corners” of the sector and served by secondary streets.

Most sectors also have the same dimension, 800 × 1200 m, which is ideal for
walking and cycling, while the “rational” grid of roads between the sectors
is ideal for car driving though it would also be ideal for trams or a
bus-rapid-transit system. But as it is, the bus system is malfunctioning,
cyclists have to navigate some rather dangerous roundabouts, at each
intersection of roads, and pedestrians are in many places prevented from
crossing between sectors. Thus, with no other viable alternative to provide
transportation between the sectors, cars have proliferated, not only on the
grid roads, where they have created congestion, but also within the
sectors, where the environment is deteriorating and public space is
converted into parking space.

The late Indian architect Aditya Prakash, who had been a member of the
original design team for Chandigarh and later became the first principal of
Chandigarh College of Architecture, said: “When I was young…we could still
use the street for anything that we wanted including sleeping at night. We
did not realise while planning urban space that the automobile would be the
greatest devastator of a city.”

While Chandigarh was designed in the image of the “modern” European city
without much consideration for the qualities of the traditional Indian
city, many European cities are now adopting the image of the traditional
Indian city that Aditya talked about, i e, fewer cars and more human
activities. And, maybe that is one of the great tragedies of our time, that
despite all the means and opportunities, we are not very good at learning
from each other – one way or the other.

I was invited to Chandigarh in October 2010 to give the Le Corbusier
Memorial Lecture and decided to stay for six months teaching at the
Chandigarh College of Architecture and working with the students on some
proposals for the new master plan of the city.5 One of these proposals was
to make Sector 19 car-free. Sector 19 was one of the first sectors to be
developed and it was chosen because of its generic layout that would make
the solutions developed here easily applicable to other sectors.

The idea was quite simple. The sector has four entrance points and we
proposed to construct parking lots at each of these, two above the ground
and two below the ground. Because the entrance points are diametrically
located, two at either end of the market street and two at either end of
the green belt, the maximum walking distance from the parking lot to the
home would be about 300 m. For transportation of physically disabled
people, deliveries, garbage collection, etc, we proposed to have a mix of
cycle rickshaws and solar-powered rickshaws.

We also proposed to make bicycle lanes in the market street and through the
green belt. These lanes would connect to the four entrance points, where
there would be safe crossings for pedestrians and bicycles to the market
street or the green belt of the next sector. The crossings would be
equipped with traffic lights that would also make it possible to control
traffic in the notoriously chaotic roundabouts (400 or 600 m away). At the
crossings, there could be stops for trams or rapid buses, where people
could conveniently get on and off.

By removing all cars from the sector, a lot of space is liberated. It is
estimated that about 25% of the total surface area of the sector is
currently used by cars, either for driving or parking, and much of it is
covered with asphalt. All of this asphalt, which contributes significantly
to the overheating of the city, could be removed, and instead, eco-friendly
pathways for pedestrians, bicycles, cycle- and solar-powered rickshaws
could be constructed. These would be much narrower though, still providing
sufficient space for emergency vehicles.

The liberated space could be used for communal activities, such as
playgrounds, sports fields and community kitchen gardens. Some of it could
also be used to accommodate the people who work in the sector but live in
villages, slum areas and rehabilitation colonies on the outskirts of the
city. If the car is not parked in front of the house, but a few hundred
metres away in a parking lot, much more shopping, in fact, many more
activities, would take place locally. This would help reinvigorate the
decaying market street, which could be made much more bazaar-like. In fact,
a lot of space, which is currently used for parking in the market street,
could be leased out to commercial activities and this could pay for the new
parking facilities at the four entrance points of the sector.

Our proposal to make Sector 19 car-free would, undoubtedly, be met with
opposition from some citizens, perhaps not so much because they would have
to walk a bit more, but because they would “lose” an important, perhaps
*the* most important, status symbol. Or, as one of the students put it: “If
the car is no longer parked in front of your house, why have a car at all?”

We submitted the proposal to the Master Plan Commission in December 2010,
and then nothing happened. At least not until September 2011, when the High
Court of Punjab and Haryana, while hearing a petition to introduce
so-called eco-cabs and discussing the issues of traffic congestion and
pollution in the city, directed the administration to declare one of its
sectors vehicle-free as a test, suggesting that it could be Sector 17.6 This
is the commercial centre of the city, and may therefore be the most obvious
to start with as there are many successful examples of making shopping
areas car-free from around the world, including, of course, the traditional
north Indian bazaar. But because the organisational principle of this
sector differs from that of all the other sectors, it may be difficult to
use solutions from here in other sectors.

However, in a strange act of rebellion, the administration in March 2012
decided to chop down 60 grand old trees in Sector 17 to facilitate the
construction of an overpass for motor transport in the middle of the sector!
7 This came only days after the same administration had told the high court
that it had decided to make Sector 17 a vehicle-free zone – in phases (!) –
and asked for more time to prepare plans for this.8 Then in July 2012, the
administration told the high court that it will not be feasible to convert
Sector 17 into a vehicle-free zone.9 A year later, in July 2013, a draft
for the new master plan of Chandigarh 2031 was released. It does not make a
single mention about making Sector 17 – or any other sector for that matter
– car-free. Though it does adapt our idea of having bicycle lanes through
the green belts, but not across through the market streets, so cyclists
will, presumably, only travel straight forward.10 As for Sector 19, the
municipal corporation decided to construct a small jogging path in the park
there.11

*Conclusions*

The distinguished British architect Lord Rogers recently predicted that:
“There will be a widespread ban on cars in London within the next 20 years”.
12 Over the past hundred years, more and more cars have been added to the
streets of European cities, but because it has happened over such a
relatively long span of time, drivers, planners and authorities have had
time to adapt and adjust.

In contrast to this, many Chinese cities have witnessed explosive growth of
private motorised transportation over a much shorter period of time, which
has forced authorities to react in a kind of emergency. Thus, a growing
number of Chinese cities are now introducing a vehicles quota “as public
anger grows over worsening congestion and air pollution”.13

Regardless of the different political systems, in both Europe and China, it
is concerned citizens, activists and experts who push the authorities to
act. In many Indian cities, private motorised transportation is growing
even faster than in China and the problems are in no way less severe.
Several initiatives are being taken to revert this trend, but in too many
cases they are met with resistance rather than with support from relevant
authorities.

As the cases here demonstrate, activists and experts, even high court
judges, cannot change the situation if the authorities do not want to play
ball. The lessons from both the East and the West are that citizens have to
actively push the authorities to act. For citizens to react, however,
against something that most of them see as an important symbol of status,
they have to understand the gravity and the urgency of the problem, what
the alternatives are and how they may be implemented. In that respect, what
activists, experts and others are doing is extremely important, even if the
immediate effects seem limited.

*Notes*

1 http://henrikvaleur.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/
 the-horrendous-costs-of-motorized-transportation-in-indian-cities/

2 http://www.nammacycle.in/

3
http://thealternative.in/environment/namma-cycle-hop-on-hop-off-when-nee...<http://thealternative.in/environment/namma-cycle-hop-on-hop-off-when-need-to/>

4 *IISc E-Mobilty Project: Preliminary Service & Operations Plan*; CiSTUP
and EMBARQ; 2012.

5 http://henrikvaleur.wordpress.com/2012/02/
 19/chandigarh-an-indian-adventure/

6 http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/
 2011-09-24/chandigarh/30197843_1_vehicle-free-ut-bench

7
http://www.dailypostindia.com/news/14219-ut-admn-punishes-activists-for-...<http://www.dailypostindia.com/news/14219-ut-admn-punishes-activists-for-preventing-tree-felling-in-sec-17.html>
(11
March 2012).

8
http://m.indianexpress.com/news/%22ut-to-make-sector-17-vehiclefree%22/9...<http://m.indianexpress.com/news/%22ut-to-make-sector-17-vehiclefree%22/921535/>
(8
March 2012).

9
http://m.indianexpress.com/news/%22not-feasible-to-turn-sector-17-into-v...<http://m.indianexpress.com/news/%22not-feasible-to-turn-sector-17-into-vehiclefree-zone-ut-to-hc%22/971310/>
(7
July 2012).

10 http://chandigarh.gov.in/cmp_2031.htm

11
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chandigarh/Sector-19-to-get-jogg...<http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chandigarh/Sector-19-to-get-jogging-track-soon/articleshow/19762205.cms>

12 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/cyclesafety/article3816510.ece

13 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-10/
 china-to-widen-car-purchase-curbs-to-fight-pollution-group-says.html