Transforming urban mobility in India — II

After almost four decades of dealing with regulations governing fuel efficiency and exhaust emissions, auto-makers seem to be running out of options to gain further improvements from conventional engines. A modern petrol or diesel car emits less than 5 per cent of the harmful emissions compared to its predecessor from four decades ago. Further investments and innovation are seen to yield diminishing returns.

This has spawned a wave of investment in electric vehicles, connected cars, autonomy and shared mobility.

Betting big on e-vehicles

Electric vehicles (EV) have emerged as an increasingly attractive option mainly through improvements in energy-density, power-density and cost of batteries. Batteries based on contemporary chemistry (usually Lithium Ion) are providing the kind of useful range in a passenger car that is acceptable to a growing fraction of users.

Environmentalists and city administrators, who are seeking solutions that limit deterioration in urban air quality, welcome the fact that EVs have zero exhaust emissions and lower carbon emissions than conventional cars. They have fewer moving parts, potentially lowering cost of manufacture and extending useful life.

Yet, electric cars are alone not the panacea for urban mobility. In many cities a good fraction of rush-hour traffic comprises single occupant cars. Visualise the typical automobile — it encapsulates an average driver weighing 65 kg in a machine that weighs 1,300 kg — likely more if it is electric. Electric cars may be more efficient than conventional cars but they cannot flout the laws of physics — moving so much mass burns a lot of energy that is typically generated with not insignificant carbon emissions.

Furthermore, this driver would need exclusive allocation of at least 10 sq.m of urban road space. A recent experiment in San Francisco, where the city made visible the cost/value of mundane city assets (like trees, pavements, roads, parking spaces, etc.) was eye-opening, pointing to hidden subsidies enjoyed by car users. It is, therefore, no surprise that cities like Singapore, Hong Kong, New York and Tokyo, that seek to sustain high population densities and high economic activity per square km, have come to depend on mass transit and shared mobility and discourage use of private cars.

The dawning of our digitised economy has provided a multiplier effect for many promising shared-mobility solutions. Even as the prospect of car ownership spreads to a larger fraction of city dwellers, especially in developing economies, a generation that is increasingly populated by digital migrants and digital natives, is growing comfortable with alternatives to car ownership.

They increasingly employ myriad mobility solutions and apps that promise to deflect the trajectory for motorisation. Time wasted in traffic congestion and the spectre of limited and increasingly expensive parking also lessen the attraction to car use. Uber and Ola have proven useful to many affluent urban commuters.

Unfortunately, the wave of urbanisation in many countries has led to gentrification of city centre areas. Lower income groups have been forced to peripheral suburbs lowering opportunities and increasing cost and time they must allocate to commuting. The tenets that govern new mobility architectures must promote inclusive access to mobility. Mexico, for example, has defined mobility as a basic human right and this helps steer policies that are inclusive. Rides in Uber or Ola are not viable solutions for most commuters. Fortunately, our digitised economy has also had a democratising effect. Now imagine if each ride was to be shared among two or three commuters as with UberPool. This results in further lowering of cost, energy use and carbon emissions per commuter. Carrying this exercise a step further, many cities, including San Francisco and New York, have extended this concept to vans, aggregating 10-12 passengers at a time, further improving footprint and carbon efficiency.

With such demand-based, dynamically-routed services, cities are discovering that they can efficiently augment mass and shared transit capacity while leveraging private capital.

Rediscovering neglected modes

Many cities are also re-discovering neglected travel modes that are augmented with modern technology.

Pedestrian zones and thoroughfares are reappearing in cities like Seoul, Barcelona and New York. Bike-lanes and bike-sharing solutions are a growing trend in Amsterdam and Paris. Affordable e-bikes expand the attraction of bikes to even elderly populations and allow longer distance travel. These modes come with low cost of use and are environment-friendly. Even that low-profile transportation mode, the humble bus, enjoys iconic status in London where it transports more people than any other mode. And with new all-electric double-deckers and dedicated bus-lanes, they will retain their prominent role in London’s future.

For medium density corridors, bus rapid transit has proven to be a lower investment alternative to underground metro-rail for cities like Curitiba and Seattle. And as Hong Kong has demonstrated, for the kind of high density transit corridors that many Indian cities have, modern metro-rails are unbeatable. We need to accelerate investment in all these modes.

With such a variety of attractive options, it can only be lack of imagination or understanding, if our planners repeatedly come back to solutions that offer more highways and flyovers in our cities. Enrique Penalosa, an urban evangelist and former Mayor of Bogota, has often stressed “what differentiates advanced cities is not highways and flyovers, but rather quality side-walks and cycle ways”.

Each city brings a unique set of constraints. We need a framework that is based upon basic social and economic tenets and relies on a combination of investment, policy and regulations to sensibly harness and steer the multiple modal options, technologies, and mobility solutions. This we will elaborate in the third part of this series.

The writer is Chairman, Celeris Technologies

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