On April 27, a panel of experts gathered at the Indian Habitat Center in New Delhi, India, for the first Principal Voices roundtable of 2006. The guests discussed urbanization and sustainable transport in front of an invited audience.

An essay about the discussion can be read here, and there is also a full transcript of the event here.

Following is a short series of key quotes from the participants:

Professor Geetam Tiwari, associate professor of transport planning at the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi

"In the streets of Delhi today, when you go out, you will find people walking, bicycling and at the same time you will find a couple of BMWs and Mercedes also. So it is this range of technologies that is going to share the road space. I don't think the history of urbanization can give us a solution to this."

"A two-wheeler you can take from door to door, you can park it in front of your house -- in front of your room in fact. The marginal cost of using a two-wheeler today is less than one rupee a kilometer. So whether you talk about costs or about safety, this is what the consumer is looking for."

"Roads are among the most public spaces that are available in cities, and they have become completely out of the control of the public."

"When I go to the U.S., I drive like a US citizen. People react to the physical and other environment around them. And the physical environment plays a very major role."

"There is not one single country where if you do road safety education, fatalities have come down."

Bill Reinert, national manager of advanced technologies, Toyota USA.

"Even allowing for advancements in environmental science and reducing the footprint of the automobile, (in 20 to 30 years) we'll still have an environmental problem that is four to five times what it is today."

"Los Angeles is still an automobile/petrol dominated economy. The problem is, we're in gridlock. We're in gridlock probably 14 hours a day in some areas. And we can't build our way out of that -- you just can't."

"The cities in southern California didn't start out as sprawling, they started out to be small cities and they've grown together. And a lot of that is because of the way we chose to develop our transportation infrastructure. Had we chosen a different path, we might be talking a different story today."

"It's easy to see how you can get peer-to-peer communication in the automobiles, develop a transport Internet if you will. That means it's easy to see how my car can talk to your car as we're going down the road. You may be five miles ahead of me and may see traffic occurring, and can communicate that to my car."

Gordon Feller, chief executive of the California-based Urban Age Institute think tank.

"You have to fight the sprawl, to prevent Los Angeles-ization of cities throughout the world. In India, in Africa, in China, you're going to have to densify, which means a different model that the city form is going to be."

"And a lot of cities think about planning as a future visioning task when in fact the developers are doing the work today, sometimes unregulated or lightly regulated."

"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."

"Investing the resources in a post-carbon transportation system is a trillion-dollar worldwide undertaking, and this another place where US leadership is lacking."

"If we don't find those kinds of leaders who can galvanize a constituency and a coalition in these cities, I'm worried. The leaders are there, the question is, will they emerge to take charge?"

Dr Elattuvalapil Sreedharan, managing director, Delhi Metro Rail Corporation

"For any city that is growing up today, mobility is the most important factor to be looked into: that means transportation. And it's one that defines the quality of life in the city."

"We can bring some order to the streets if we have a metro system where the bulk of the traffic is taken on the metro system and the remaining area is comfortable for the rest of the traffic."

"Everyone has got the impression that the metro system is very, very expensive and it is bleeding people - no. Our experience so far is that the metro has created more wealth in the city than its own investment."

"(The Delhi metro) is not only comfortable, it is safe, it's reliable and it's fast."