Hello, friends!
All of us hear the noise from traffic every day.
According to the TomTom traffic index 2022,
Bangalore is the second most traffic-congested city in the world. At peak times, the traffic is so bad that it takes
18 minutes 40 seconds on average to drive 5 km. This statistic is so amazing
because if you cycle for 5 km, it will take less time. But this is not just about Bangalore. This is the story of all the big cities in India.
Traffic, time waste, noise pollution, air pollution, overcrowding, is a big part of our daily lives which is perhaps not discussed much. The terrible state our cities are in. But how will it feel if I tell you, friends, that there is a very simple
solution to all these problems. Ban cars. I'm not kidding.
This is an actual solution which has already been implemented in many developed countries. And I believe that it will be even more effective in Indian cities. In this article, let's understand these problems and solutions step by step. Let's first look at the
problem of air pollution. What is the reason for air pollution in our cities?
If we talk about Delhi, stubble burning in Haryana and Punjab is often blamed. The fires that are set on the fields. This is, no doubt, a major source of air pollution. But according to a 2022 study by the Centre for Science and Environment, the biggest contribution among the local sources is actually vehicular emission. The smoke emitted by vehicles, 51% of air pollution in Delhi is caused by this. Before this, the studies that were conducted in 2018 by ARAI and TERI, held motor vehicles very responsible. And this is just a direct contribution. If we see the CSE's 2022 analysis, they have said that 4% of air pollution is due to road dust. 7% due to construction activities. These are also indirectly related to vehicles. Road dust is due to roads. In construction, there is a lot of construction of highways and roads. Now this same story is even more valid for other Indian cities. Like Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata where the issue of stubble burning does not exist. See this article on Gaon Connection.
And what is the reason behind this?
Another report states that motor vehicles are the number one source of noise pollution in cities. You can also observe this personally the amount of honking noise we hear in Indian subcontinent cities is not heard in any other region of the world. So there's no doubt about this, whether it is air pollution or noise pollution, the biggest contribution here is motor vehicles and cars.
What should be done?
As a solution, many people suggest that we should start using electric vehicles. But if we look at developed countries, we will see that electric vehicles are not a solution. Look at this report.
It's a report from the UK in 2023. According to this, in countries like the United Kingdom, the smoke coming out of exhaust pipes is no longer the main source of air pollution.
The main source is actually tyre dust. 52% of the small particle pollution caused by road transport is actually due to tyre and brake wear. When a car is driven on the road, the friction creates small particles of the road that mix with the air to cause air pollution. And
after this is the smoke emitted from the exhaust, which accounts for only 15% contribution, to the air pollution. Isn't this amazing? This means that if we use electric cars, then only 15% of the pollution will be reduced. Air pollution due to tyre dust, brake wear, and road abrasion will remain the same. This is the reason why during the pandemic, during the lockdowns, The air in many cities was cleaner than it had been in the last few decades.
In
Nepal's Kathmandu, people saw Mount Everest from the city after a few decades. The same thing happened in Manila, Philippines.
A famous mountain was visible from a distance. In Spain,
wild boars were seen roaming on the streets of Barcelona. In San Francisco, coyotes were seen. Near the White House, deer were seen grazing.
Why did all this happen?
Because cars had disappeared from the cities.
In Indian cities, almost 50% reduction was seen in the PM 2.5 levels during the lockdown. Now let's talk about the
third problem. which is traffic. What is traffic and why does it happen?
Some of you might say that it happens because of small roads or because of bad roads. But I would say that traffic exists because of cars.
Think for yourself, what is traffic actually?
Traffic is a collection of cars, two-wheelers, buses and trucks. And the number one reason behind traffic among all these, is actually cars. because cars occupy a lot of space on the road. To visualize this, I would like to show you a image.
This image shows 5 different modes of transport. If we start from the left, cars, buses, trains, bicycles and walking. This
image shows us that if we have to take 200 people from point A to point B, how much space is required? If 200 people walk, then such a small space is enough. If we use a train or metro, then one train or metro is enough. If you take a bus, then only 9 buses will be enough. But if these 200 people take a car, then see how much more space is needed. How wide will the roads need to be. How many more roads will have to be built just to accommodate cars. And in Indian cities, where the population density is already very high, this issue becomes even more critical because the importance of space is manifold. Should we use space in our cities to make places like parks, gardens and walking tracks for people? Or should we use that space to make roads for cars?
The logic is simple. Instead of cars, if the people in cities use buses, metros, cycles, or even walk more, the traffic will be reduced in our cities. And the more people use cars, the more roads will be needed to be built and less space will be left for other things. Now I will show you an amazing data. National Family Health Survey 5 was conducted between 2019 and 2021. According to this survey, only 8% of the families in the country own cars.
Can you imagine this number?
Only 8% of people own cars in India and the traffic is this bad already. Imagine if this number reaches 50-60% instead of a mere 8%,
then how many more cars will we see in our cities? How many more roads will have to be built for them? And how bad will be the overcrowding, traffic, and air pollution?
As per this survey,
more than
50% of households in our country own a cycle and
more than 50% own a motorcycle or two-wheeler. This is good news from this perspective because cycles and motorcycles don't take up that much space. Watch the comparison video again.
to transport 200 people from one place to another the amount of space being taken by cycles. Now this space problem becomes even more extreme when you pay attention to how much are the cars actually used. According to studies, private cars are used
only 5-6% of the time. 95% of the time, cars are parked in the parking. Parked either in the house or at the office.
Empty cars are occupying more space than cars running on the roads. Compare a private car to a taxi.
How much does a family use their car in a day?
3 hours to travel between office and home or to go shopping or something. Out of 24 hours, the remaining 21 hours the car is parked. Either at home, at office or somewhere else. But on the other hand, a taxi keeps running for nearly 8-12 hours, stays in operation, and transports people. So, if you look at it from this perspective, you will understand how much the problem of overcrowding in cities is increasing due to private vehicles.
The fourth problem is flooding. You must have experienced it personally. In the rainy season, the roads of our cities often get converted into rivers. A big reason behind this is that there is no proper drainage system. But apart from this, there is another big reason, in the cities, the areas for water to flow out, keep on disappearing. The more concrete is laid on the ground, the more roads are laid, the more water will not be able to flow into the ground. Rainwater will only go into the ground when there is soil, grass or any natural landscape above the ground. So,
this means that building big roads, highways, flyovers in cities will always increase the chances of flooding.
Then the fifth problem is road accidents. If you look at the statistics of murder in India, According to NCRB 2021 data, on average, there were 82 murders in India every day. That is a big number! But now if see the number of people killed in road accidents every day, on average, This number is 422 deaths every day. More than 5 times the people are killed in road accidents every day in our country as compared to the number of people killed in murders. There can be many reasons behind this. Overspeeding, being distracted while driving, drunk driving. But the root cause behind all these reasons are cars. The fewer people travel by car, the lesser will be the rate of accidents. Friends, road traffic injuries is the 8th leading cause of death worldwide. Almost 1.4 million people die every year because of this. But this is not discussed in the media, and so people never worry about it. The chances of a person dying in a road accident is exponentially higher as compared to the other risks that are considered more serious. Imagine, if our news channels, would cover road accident deaths in the same way that other crime-related news are covered. Every evening,
the news would show the people who died in road accidents that day, people would have been so scared that they wouldn't use cars anymore. Another problem is
that people consider these deaths as accidents. Whereas
the truth is that 300 years ago, when there were no cars, there weren't these kind of deaths. And finally, the problem is climate change. Look at this graph,
it shows that in America, in 2021, total greenhouse gas emissions from various economic sectors. The transportation sector is the number
one contributor with 28%. And in this contribution by the transportation sector,
how much is the contribution of vehicles?
For that, look at this pie chart,
which shows
the distribution of carbon dioxide emissions produced by the transportation sector worldwide in 2021. As expected, the
biggest contribution is of passenger cars at 39%. This shows that a major driver behind the climate change are vehicles.
Now, you must be wondering after hearing all this, what I mean to say.
Should all the cars be banned in the country? Should the Prime Minister one day say that all the cars are banned thereafter?
No, that won't be right. That will be a little too much. Because such instant decisions always have a negative impact. Like demonetisaition, this will be a good way to crash the economy. These actual solutions, friends, should be taken step by step. There are many such steps. Let's discuss all these solutions one by one, so that our cities can be made better. And can be made more livable.
The first solution is to identify the most overcrowded and popular areas
and make those areas car-free. That is, to ban cars from those specific areas. A typical example of this can be any busy market that is frequented by a lot of people, due to which a lot of traffic is created and it becomes very overcrowded inside.
The second step would be to identify roads in a city where cars are not seen much. Cars should be banned from those roads specifically.
And those
roads should be for pedestrians and cyclists. I told you, at the beginning of the article that this is a problem which was already identified by several developed countries and they are working on solving it. So let's see some positive examples from all over the world. Look at this road in Poland.
Cars were allowed here in 2013. In 2022, it was designated for pedestrians and cyclists only. Another such example. Look at the number of cars parked on the side, in 2009. And in 2023, trees were planted here and this became a nice road for walking around. See this road
in Glasgow, in 2016, there were 3-4 lanes for cars. After closing off 2 lanes, a lane was designated for cycles, and trees were planted. By making the roads smaller, there was more space in the city to plant trees.
This is a third solution, which sounds counter-intuitive. We think that we should make the roads bigger, but making the roads smaller is a solution.
If the roads are smaller for vehicles, we will get more space to grow trees, there will be more greenery in the city, people will have more space to walk. Look at this very popular road in Spain,
once there were so many cars on this road. Now, it has become a wonderful street for people. Another example from Spain, look at this road during the 1980s, just like the roads we see in India today And look at the transformation in 2020, how beautiful a city looks when cars are banned and places are built for people to walk. Look at the example
of Netherlands, cars were banned from the roads completely roads were open for cycles only. This has been done a lot in the Netherlands.
They used the opportunity to plant more greenery on this road. The next photo is from Slovenia's capital Ljubljana.
Cars were banned from this bridge, people can cross the bridge by walking across it. So imagine how healthy people will be. The good news is that there are some positive examples in India too, which are inspirations for the other places. Like this JM Road in Pune.
Cars were banned from this popular road, a bigger space was designated for people to walk on. Such a small change but its impact is so huge. This road looks so better now. Next example, is from Delhi. Where a big stretch of road, is just for walking, for cycling, and there's a big green area in the middle which keeps the footpaths far away from cars. So that while walking on the footpath, people don't have to suffer a lot due to the air pollution. For the first solution I told you about, you can see a working example in Delhi. The Chandni Chowk area. Earlier, cars were allowed in that area, so it was jammed. People couldn't move from here to there. I
take this pic when I went there in 2019.Recently, the government has renovated it and banned cars from the entire interior section. So, look at the result. There's a good open space to look around. Less noise pollution, less air pollution and it looks so beautiful. An interesting thing to note is that if there are more such roads, people would want to use cars less. It would incentivise people to walk more or use cycles to go around. Once there are such roads surrounded by greenery. This will reduce the traffic and noise caused by cars. You'd say that it is not possible for every situation. That you can walk to every place at all times. That's true, which leads us to the fourth solution the taxpayer funds spent on roads by the government it should be spent less on building roads for cars and more on public transport.
More metro lines should be built, more trains and buses should be built by the government. This is a
medium to long-term process which will take time to be implemented but the government should intend to make this happen. According to the 2021 budget,
we have
spent 2.2 trillion rupees in the development of roads. The money
allocated to be spent on hospitals, plus that on power generation, plus that on irrigation, and the money spent on railways, All of this combined is less than what was spent on roads. In this graph,
you can see that from
2001 to 2019, the total length of urban roads in India has kept on increasing. We are building more roads. Compare this graph
with the other one which shows the
number of vehicles in operation in India. From 1951 to 2020, the number of vehicles on our roads has been increasing. And the rate of increase is also increasing. Along with that, the speed of road construction is also increasing rapidly, although it has not increased that rapidly. Because of this, every month or two you see that a new road is being constructed, a new flyover is being built, or a new highway is being built.
Unfortunately, only 8% of the families use cars in the country. If we keep on telling everyone to own cars, keep on building highways, then this construction will never stop in the next 100 years. A concept is often mentioned here.
Induced demand. As
I said a while ago the better the roads are for walking and cycling, the more people will be attracted to walking and cycling. A similar impact is seen with
the construction of roads. The more the roads are made wider and bigger, the more will be the induced demand among people. People will start using more cars. This is the reason why in cities lik
e Los Angeles, where 10-lane highways have been built, traffic never stops. You can see huge traffic jams there. Because in simple language,
cars are a very inefficient use of space. To deal with this problem, some countries have
adopted very innovative solutions, like Singapore, they have set a limit on the number of cars allowed on the roads. On the other hand,
some countries try to disincentivize vehicles by imposing parking charges. So that there is no free parking in any area of the city. People should always be charged for parking, so
people will use their own vehicles lesser, and will use taxis and buses more, which will be a good thing overall, if we look at it from the perspective of space. Now, the
next solution is related to the design of a city. Think about it,
when you use a car, where do you go?
To travel from your home to your workplace. To go to school. Or to go to shopping malls, markets, or cinema theatres. All of us use our cars more these handful purposes 95% of the time. Friends, imagine if these few things, were available at walking distance from your home. If your workplace was 200 metres away from your home, to which you could simply walk daily. If getting to the market to get groceries was at a walking distance. If you had to go to a clothes shop or to a barber to get a haircut, you could simply walk for 10 minutes. This concept is called the 15-minute city concept. Cities like Paris are trying to implement it today.
It is a very easy way to get rid of cars from a city. In a city,
almost everything is available for everyone withing a 15-minutes walking distance. You can
walk to it or cycle to it. The use of
cars will automatically decline. If we look at our history, then the 15-minute city concept was seen everywhere in our history. See the old city
of Jaipur or the old Delhi area. The area of Old Varanasi is a very good example of this. Historically, for the people living in these cities, everything was available to them within a radius of 500m-1km. But unfortunately, since
the modernization of our cities, we have started building things in separate areas. In new cities like Gurgaon,
all the
offices there are located in one area. The residential areas are located 10 km away in a large area. To
go to the shopping malls, you need to travel another 10-15 km. In the name of
modernization, we have built the cities in a way that people need to use cars to go from one place to another, to do their daily chores. But this should not happen. The
French capital Paris has made a new plan to build a school for children in every neighbourhood. Parking of vehicles will be removed and roads will be cleared to build gardens and parks. Every
person living in the city should have a green areas around them, parks, playgrounds, and schools nearby. Imagine how beautiful a city would look like if this happens. The solutions I told you about till now were
all supply-side solutions. Where the government needs to take action to bring about change. Now let's talk about
demand-side solutions, where the public can take action. People like you and me can take action to bring about change.
The first and easiest thing, if possible, instead of using your own cars, use public transport. Buses, metros or trains. In terms of carbon dioxide emissions, buses contribute 33% and cars 31%. But buses carry 58% of passengers and cars carry only 4% of passengers. A bus can carry 20 times more passengers.
How much space does that save?
The more people use public transport, the more money the government will spend to make it better.
Second, if it is possible for you to use a cycle, then use a cycle. And if you have a hard time cycling, then you can use an e-cycle or an e-scooter.
Third, change your perspective on cars. In India, people often see cars as a symbol of success and pride. People show off the car that they have. Or the car they are going to buy. They feel proud of their cars. You are feeling proud about such an iron box, whose job is to transport you from A to B. It's not entirely your fault if you feel this way, because this perception was crafted intentionally. These car manufacturing companies have repeatedly shown you in their advertisements that you should feel proud. Buying a car is the definition of success. You have been emotionally misled to feel this way. Have you ever noticed that in the ads for cars,
when they show off the cars, it is always at empty locations?
Like a car being driven in the mountains. How you too can drive the car with the glass down in the clean air, in the middle of the jungle. What a beautiful experience it is to own a car and to drive a car.
But what is the reality?
99% of the time, when you buy a new car and drive it, the glass is always closed, you are inhaling the emissions of other cars and you are stuck in a traffic jam. But the car manufacturers will never show you ads like this. If they start showing this, no one will buy their cars. The thing is, if you can avoid buying a car, if you don't have a big use for a car in your life, you use it 3-4 times in a month only, then it is better for you not to buy a car and use taxis in those 3-4 cases. This will save you a lot of money and a lot of trouble.
And finally, the last solution is to talk more about these problems. Spread awareness among people. You can do so by sharing this article with your friends and family members so that they get to know about these issues too. The more people talk about these issues, the more pressure will be on the government to take action related to these problems.
If you ask me for my personal opinion, I imagine a future where cars are banned in the cities. Cars would be used to travel from one city to another city or a village where other means of transportation are not possible. Cars fit in places with a smaller population. But in cities where the population density is very high, buses, trains, metros, trams, cycles, walking and taxis should be allowed, in my opinion. It seems difficult to imagine such a future, but there are many cities in the world that are getting closer to this future. And those are among the most developed cities in the world. A great example of this is Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Which started this transformation many years ago. And I'll see you in the next article.
Thank you very much.
