Five Traffic Myths of Delhi (And Other Indian Cities) by Swati Madan and Shreekant Gupta the Mention of Ashram Chowk Strikes
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Five traffic myths of Delhi (and other Indian cities) by Swati Madan and Shreekant Gupta The mention of Ashram Chowk strikes terror in the heart of Delhi commuters. Located in the southeast corner of Delhi, it is a busy intersection where two major roads of the city, Ring Road and Mathura Road, meet. Few people know the name is eponymous with a tiny ashram located there. The intersection is anything but tranquil. With perpetual traffic jams, convoys of smoke belching trucks, unending Metro construction and a flyover that had to be shut for repairs only 14 years after it was built, Ashram represents not only what has gone horribly wrong with Delhi’s traffic but with other cities as well. Myth #1. Traffic can’t become worse The worst is yet to come. Motor vehicle ownership grows slowly at low levels of income, shoots up at middle income levels ($3,000 to $10,000 per capita) before tapering off at higher incomes (the “saturation” level). For India, the saturation level will be at around 683 vehicles per 1000 people, versus 807 for China and 853 for the United States. At present we have only 117 vehicles per 1000 people! More worrying, car ownership rates are even lower – 13 per 1000 people (two wheelers are 74 per 1000, the rest is other vehicles). In short, there will be many more motor vehicles on the road, almost six times as many, and more of these are going to be cars. So be prepared for even longer commutes. If this were not enough, most of these cars will ply in ‘million plus’ cities not just due to rising incomes but due to urban sprawl. We are urbanising wastefully in terms of land--built-up area is growing faster than population in nearly all of the largest 100 Indian cities as they devour their rural fringe. The average density of the 53 ‘million- plus’ cities declined by 25% from the 1990s to the 2010s (from 40,000/sq km to 30,000/sq km). The capital region in particular has exploded spatially--its urbanised area is now almost 750 sq kms., twice that of Mumbai and Kolkata. 40-50 km one way commutes from Noida to Gurgaon are the new normal. Myth#2. More roads and flyovers will ease congestion Our engineers and babus think mobility is about moving (mainly private) vehicles not about moving people. With regard to moving vehicles too, better traffic management such as stricter enforcement, is eschewed in favour of big bucks spent on road projects such as flyovers and road widening. After all, that is where money is to be made. Delhi already has one of the world's highest proportions of road area—a fifth (21%) of its total area is given to roads. Its road network is 33,000 kms long and the city has nearly 100 flyovers. Other Indian cities are following suit in building more roads and flyovers. But what good is a 3 lane carriageway when one is taken up by parked vehicles and another by vendors and hawkers? No one talks about better traffic management--Delhi has merely 6,600 traffic cops to manage over 9 million vehicles! They effectively work one shift--it is rare to see a traffic cop on Delhi’s roads at night except at major entry points extorting from trucks (National Crime Records Bureau recently reported of all complaints filed against cops in India, more than a fifth were against Delhi Police alone). What is worse, given its VIP culture, a disproportionate number of traffic cops are deployed in Lutyens’ Delhi. A corollary of this myth is all Delhites have equal access to roads. Nothing could be further from the truth--it is a city of cars, by cars and for cars. Half a dozen cars with a dozen people in them hog as much road space as a bus with five dozen people— public transport meets 60% of travel demand but occupies only 5% of road space. In effect, public money is spent on moving cars in a perverse subsidy. Myth #3. Parking is our birth right “No parking, tyres will be deflated” is a common sign on walls of many properties in Delhi. But wait a minute, this refers to space outside their property which does not belong to them! On average a car in Delhi driven only 5% of the time, the rest of the time it is parked, typically on public space. At approximately Rs. 10,000 per square foot and with each parked car occupying about 60 square feet, this de facto privatization amounts to robbery of Rs. 6 lakhs (the bigger your car and the more you have the bigger your heist). In fact, parking outside of one’s property anywhere at any time is not an entitlement, it is a commercial transaction. And the stupidly low one time MCD parking fee of Rs. 4,000 when Delhites buy a new car does not entitle them to land grab. Myth#4. Delhi Metro will solve all problems No, it will not. It cannot till we create disincentives for private vehicle owners (see Myth#3). The Metro is an expensive and ineffective solution for Delhi’s traffic congestion. A kilometre of overground Metro costs about Rs. 100-150 crores (ten times that of BRT) whereas each kilometre underground is about 3 times as much. Though it is heavily used and overcrowded its private vehicle displacement effect is minimal. In many cases it has replaced buses as the preferred mode of public transport for Delhi’s working class from far flung areas such as Rithala, Shahdara and Badarpur. In Delhi University too, ‘U specials’ (buses) have disappeared and students now use Metro. Given urban sprawl, the Metro will forever play catch up with the city that expands amoeba like. Myth#5. The West (and East) cannot teach us Indeed, no two cities are alike. But Delhi and other Indian cities are unique also in that they are ‘knowledge proof’! While Singapore and London have conclusively shown the efficacy of congestion pricing, Delhi steadfastly refuses to even run a pilot. In Singapore, the cost of acquiring a car is a multiple of its sale price since along with it one has to buy a Certificate of Entitlement (COE). Only a fixed number of COEs are allowed based on road capacity. While cities world over have made parking prohibitively expensive to discourage car use, it remains free or ludicrously low in Delhi and in other Indian cities. Indian cities persist with a ‘carrot-and-no- sticks’ approach that is doomed to fail. If we do not learn from the mistakes of others or from their best practices we have only ourselves to blame. 1084 words Swati Madan is with the Centre for Civil Society and Shreekant Gupta is with the Delhi School of Economics and LKY School of Public Policy, Singapore. He was former Director, National Institute of Urban Affairs, New Delhi. The views expressed by the authors are personal. .