New Government’s Agenda: Battle the car bulge

Mobility crisis has hit our cities hard. As public transport, walking and cycling are fast losing space to cars and two-wheelers, energy inefficiency, carbon intensity and toxic pollution are getting locked in the transportation infrastructure. This is snuffing the life out of cities and diverting resources towards car-centric infrastructure—making the mobility crisis irreversible.

Urban agenda of the new government has to fix this crisis. Even though the policies around transportation and mobility have changed considerably to integrate principles of sustainability, and investments have been directed to augment bus programmes and metro and pedestrian infrastructure, the scale of action is yet to gather momentum. There also exists a yawning gap between policies and implementation. To address all these, the new government must first recognise the many facets of mobility crisis.

Transport emissions: Transport emissions, both carbon and other toxic emissions, are difficult to tame. This hard-to-abate sector is dominated by road transport and threatens to upset the energy and carbon budget of the country. The International Energy Agency (IEA) states that the energy use of transport, especially road transport, is set to increase manifold in the stated policy scenario between 2010 and 2040. Cities cannot meet clean air targets without effective action on vehicles, which are among the top three polluters in Indian cities and are responsible for public health risks from cardiovascular diseases to cancer to low weight at birth.

Cars mean congestion: Since 2000, new vehicle registrations have doubled every five to six years. The share of personal vehicles in the overall vehicle registration is, on an average, 85-90 per cent. Even though travel demand has soared, the share of public transport in meeting this demand is declining. Across cities, dependence on personal vehicles ranges from 35 per cent to 45 per cent; by comparison, the share of public transport is 25 per cent. Intermediate public transport meets yet another 10 per cent of the travel demand. In fact, dependence on private transport is higher in smaller cities where formal public transport systems are limited or non-existent. Traffic congestion because of cars is crippling. An analysis by Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) in Delhi shows that traffic speeds go down by as much as 32 per cent during morning peaks and up to 37 per cent during evening peaks. Estimates show that passenger kilometres (transporting a passenger over 1 km) are expected to triple by 2050, with the average trip length and its rate set to increase with city size and income. Demand for private transport is, in fact, set to overtake that of public transport by 2040.

Electric buses sub-optimal: Even as India builds its ambition for electric mobility, especially the electric bus programme, investments would be sub-optimal if the electric buses cannot move freely in cities. Electric buses are a lot cheaper today due to the demand aggregation strategy for bus procurement. They have helped to reduce the cost of operation on a per kilometre basis by 23 per cent to 27 per cent, even without subsidy. With subsidy, the cost of operation of these buses is cheaper by 31 per cent to 35 per cent when compared with buses that run on diesel or compressed natural gas (CNG). Yet it is challenging to scale up electric bus services and mainstream them to become the dominant service in cities.

Metro not meeting ridership target: About 16 cities have metro lines, but most of them are single corridors without a network. Nearly all metro systems have 25 per cent to 35 per cent of their projected ridership on an average. Delhi’s Metro Rail Corporation has achieved the highest ridership compared to others, and it is less than half of the projected ridership. Since all benefits and revenue generation are dependent on the actual ridership, none of the systems have achieved the estimated benefits at the time of approval of the project.

When journey gets expensive: Lack of ease of access, last-mile barriers, inadequate integration and passenger information service make public transport inaccessible and unaffordable for the majority of city dwellers. Transport interchanges further increase the cost of journey. A 2018 study by CSE showed about one-third of Delhiites could not afford the minimum bus fare, which made them captive walkers and cyclists.

But where to walk and cycle: Under several government programmes including the Smart City Mission, with the Cycles-4Change Challenge initiative embedded in it, and the Metro Rail Policy 2017, investments have flowed in for creating infrastructure for walking and cycling in cities. But they are not scalable yet. The dispersed initiatives include mostly small and single corridors that have not yet expanded as extensive networks across the city. Cities need safe access and integration, last-mile connectivity, hyper-local mobility and low-emission zones for transformation.

Restrain personal vehicles: Even as cars are congesting city roads, there is virtually no effort in any city to leverage “parking management area plans” to cap and price parking, and apply tax and pricing measures to recover the true cost of owning and using personal vehicles. Free or minimal parking fees are, in fact, hidden subsidies. It is important to remember that lack of pollution pricing is akin to inciting ownership and usage of cars.

This was first published in the 1-15 June, 2024 print edition of Down To Earth