<html> <head> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=us-ascii"> <meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 10 (filtered)"> <style>  </style> </head> <body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple> <div class=Section1> 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 <a href="http://www.wilbursmith.com/index.cfm">http://www.wilbursmith.com/index.cfm</a>.   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.   </div> </body> </html>