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 The first Principal Voices roundtable of 2006 took place in New Delhi on April 27, discussing urbanization and public transport. Below is a summary of the event. Also: 
New Delhi was the venue for the first Principal Voices roundtable of 2006, with the capital of India also providing a focus for much of the discussions on how to best deal with fast-expanding urbanization and the associated problems of public transport. Delhi itself has a population of about 14 million people, many of them extremely poor and with limited access to transport despite the city's new metro rail network. As well as containing increasing numbers of cars, Delhi also has countless rickshaws, not to mention bicycles and motorbikes. Among the four panel members speaking in front of an invited audience at the Indian Habitat Center was Geetam Tiwari, associate professor of transport planning at the Indian Institute of Technology. Tiwari argued that the bulk of the people moving to expanding cities in the developing world were, as she put it, "outside the plan" of city officials, too often ignored when transport solutions were devised. The vast majority of journeys in India's cities are short, Tiwari noted, adding: "So when we're talking about transport solutions, can we really envision a future where people will not walk or bicycle, and only other technologies can solve this problem? To me the answer is absolutely no." However, fellow panelist Dr Elattuvalapil Sreedharan, managing director of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, argued that matters could change over time. "If you are able to provide a widespread public transport system -- it could be a metro, it could be road-based -- then the number of cyclists on the road will certainly reduce, dramatically reduce," he said.
He said: "We have got the metro in a very small area of the whole city. Our own master plan is to cover the whole city only by the year 2021. So until 2021, how do people manage? They don't necessarily want to use buses. The buses aren't a very reliable or comfortable system in Delhi today." Looking to his own country, Bill Reinert, national manager of advanced technologies for Toyota USA, stressed that the current global expansion of car use was not sustainable in the long term. "What I see is happening is, in the United States, we've got 250 million cars on the road. We've got 17 million cars per year that we sell. Worldwide there are 750 million cars in the world. If you follow the demographics and the role of the developing economies we can easily see that in 20 to 30 years we'll have somewhere between 2.5 or 3 billion cars on the road," he noted. Even with technological advances, the environmental impact of such vehicle numbers would be four to five times what it is currently, Reinert warned.
"If we don't find those kinds of leaders who can galvanize a constituency and a coalition in these cities, I'm worried," he said. The growth of urban areas could not simply be stemmed or reversed, Feller noted: "Every initiative taken to discourage the flow of people into cities has failed. In every case when we've interviewed people they've said they want to be in the city because that's where the future of their country is." Among a series of points raised by guests on the floor was the idea of car-pooling, notably whether it would be more likely to succeed in a culture like India, where social interdependence is widespread. Reinert dismissed this idea, saying India would find that as its economy became less wedded to traditional working times, pooling would become more difficult. There were other issues, he added: "The other thing I will say is that I have car pooled for many years, that I am tired of hearing the same stories, and the last thing I want to do is hear my compatriots' problem at work on my way home. "I have my own damn problems," he said to laughter. |
But metro systems such as Delhi's were both expensive and slow to come on line, Sreedharan warned.
Gordon Feller, chief executive of the California-based Urban Age Institute think tank, stressed the importance of co-operation between cities, and even more so, leadership at a city-wide level.
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