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 Asia's mega-cities Planned Capitals Public Transport Road Pricing World Urban Forum Comment page Quiz  • Biofuel: Green savior or red herring? (CNN) • Migrants suffering for China boom (The Guardian UK) • Urban air pollution 'more dangerous than Chernoybl' (The Guardian UK) • Smart cameras can spot shady behavior (CNN) • Immigrants stabilize big-city populations (CNN) • Chinese premier pledges to tackle urban-rural wealth gap (Guardian, UK) |
 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 a page of key quotes here. Following is a full transcript of the roundtable. Participants:
Moderators: Michael Holmes (CNN) and Michael Elliott (Time). Throughout the transcript, underlined words are linked to news stories or reference in outside Web sites offering more information on that particular subject. CNN does not take any responsibility for the content of outside Web sites. For ease of navigation, the discussion is separated into the following parts: 1/ Introductions, the panelists lay out their main thoughts on urbanization and discuss the particular problems posed by mega-cities. Click here INTRODUCTION by Michael Elliott and Michael HolmesMARC DEN HARTOG, director of Shell Gas and Power, India: Urban transportation -- what better place to have a discussion than Delhi? Delhi is a crucible of urban transportation challenges. Some of our foreign visitors may not know it, but Delhi has got 70% of all the cars on the road in India and about 600 cars get added every day. There are huge transportation challenges here. We also have a metro system (Click here for Delhi Metro homepage) and a bus rapid transit (Click here for external site explaining this) system. We have one of the biggest municipal bus corporations in the world and it runs on natural gas. But then of course all of us also are very aware that what we face on the streets is the unequal access to mobility. A lot of people in India don't have the money even for a bus ticket. So, lots of issues very, very pertinent to Delhi. Of course the debate is much bigger than Delhi -- these are global issues we are talking about. One in two people live in cities today, and by 2030 it'll be something like five in seven, and most of those people will be living in the metropolises of the developing world like Delhi. 
(PANEL INTRODUCED) MICHAEL ELLIOT: In the issues that are in front of us today, what do you think are the key challenges that we should be talking about? GEETAM TIWARI: I think as far as urbanization and urban transport is concerned, the key challenge that we have to face is that urbanization is going to occur in southern (developing) cities, that is where the majority of the people are going to come and live in new cities. They are going to form new cities. Who are these people forming new cities? It is very interesting to know that, in fact, the people who are forming tomorrow's cities are outside the plan. We have different words to describe them, sometimes we call them squatter settlements, sometimes we call them clusters. So whether we talk about Mumbai Dharavi (Click here for external article on Mumbai Dharavi), Kibera (Click here for BBC article on Kibera) of Nairobi or we talk about the slums of Mexico City, these are the new cities of the century. And are the formal planners, the trained planners, the civil engineers or transport planners thinking about providing transport needs? Modern urban transport systems will have to understand what kind of transport systems are needed for this segment of society. That is the major challenge that we have to understand. MICHAEL HOLMES: Gordon, we'll go to you next. What is the fallout resulting from what we're doing wrong? What's been the impact of how we have urbanized? GORDON FELLER: Well, the cities are increasingly less liveable, and the politics are increasingly congested along with the traffic, and the leadership that needs to be there is often shy of making the difference that leaders need to make. The argument that we've been making now for a good couple of years is that the cities that have succeeded - Delhi, for instance, on reducing air pollutants from diesel fuel - ave come about because leaders stepped up. Mr Lal and Sunita Narain, partners in the efforts to get the Supreme Court to play a role in reducing air pollutants in the city: (Click here for Indian article on these two men) that was an NGO leader together with a government executive who really took great risks, and were beaten up in the press and elsewhere for it, but they succeeded in turning the city into a much cleaner place to live. But the problems are very severe and the liveability and the health consequences are all around. Leaders have a hard time stepping up to the plate and I think part of the challenge these new cities are facing - and the cities that are expanding very rapidly are facing - is creating the atmosphere where the NGO leader together with the city leader, together with the corporate leader, can step up. Quite frankly not a lot of cities are doing that. MICHAEL ELLIOTT: Dr Sreedharan, does that ring a bell with you, that decisive leadership is crucial to solving the problems of urbanization and transportation? ELATTUVALAPIL SREEDHARAN: Certainly. 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. Unfortunately -- in India particularly -- we have paid very little attention to public transportation. The mega-cities like Calcutta or Delhi or Bombay -- Bombay of course has something in the form of suburban trains -- but other cities very badly lack the public transportation that is needed. The awareness has started now in this country. The lead has been taken by Delhi itself, where we have now got in place one of the youngest metros in the world. The Delhi metro phase one is just now over, and phase two has been started. Other cities are now catching up. With the success of the Deli metro, the other mega-cities in the country also want a metro. I think this culture is spreading out. The government is giving the right leadership in engaging public transport in all the cities. Of course, each city will have its own final decision on what type of transport it must have. But I'm sure, considering environmental pollution, safety, reliability, in all major of cities of more than five million population metros are inevitable in this country. MICHAEL HOLMES: Bill, give us your initial thoughts, but start by telling us what you see when you look out of your office window. BILL REINERT: My office overlooks one of the most congested arteries in the world. 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. If you take a look at the footprint, the manufacturing cost and the infrastructure cost. Even allowing for advancements in environmental science and reducing the footprint of the automobile we'll still have an environmental problem that is four to five times what it is today. And that's an amazing issue to have to deal with - and in our working lifetimes, and in the lifetimes of the people in this room. How are we going to do that? How are we going to look at the dwindling resources of oil? We've got plenty of oil but it may not be in the places that we want it to be. And the geopolitics, how that all plays out, is going to require the work of the automotive companies to develop technology. The role of urban planners is to help integrate the car into urban environments. And the role of the government is to set policies that tells the consumer where the governments will go. MICHAEL ELLIOTT: This may seem an obvious point to make. I'd like some of you to give me a sense of whether the issues we are dealing with in terms of the transportation needs of mega-cities are completely novel, completely new - whether there is anything in the history of urbanization that can help us find solutions or whether we're dealing with issues of a scale now for which there is, as it were, no human well of experience and expertise that we can draw on. GEETAM TIWARI: My understanding is that we are dealing with a new situation because we are in the 21st century. Lots of technologies which were not available are available to us now, for example information technology. And I think we have to do out-of-the-box thinking to solve the problems that we are facing today. 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. In that context we will have to deal with a situation where we have captive users even when we don't design the environment for them. As you may have seen on a lot of streets in Delhi and other Indian cities, we have made the environment extremely hostile for pedestrians and bicyclists. There's not a single city in India -- including Delhi, which is considered the richest city in India -- where you do not have a large number of people walking and using bicycles. Earlier it was mentioned that for some people it may come as a surprise that Delhi has a large number of cars. But I think even more surprising is that despite this hostile environment we have even more than one million bicyclists in the city. And what are we doing for that? Do we have any technological answers for that? Even in mega-cities that's history, where we can learn that whether we're talking about small cities or mega-cities, the majority of trips remain short trips. In Mumbai, 85% of the trips are less than 15 kilometers in length. In Deli, 75% of the trips are less than 10 kilometers in length. 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. MICHAEL HOLMES: It's interesting because in Atlanta (Click here for external article on Atlanta) in the US where I live, nobody is riding a bicycle unless they're an enthusiast, they're not doing it for transport. I'm curious what the panelists think is the difference in the problems of urbanization between the developed countries and less-developed countries. Where perhaps in India and certainly cities in India, cycling is a necessity rather than an environmental choice. So what do you see as the challenges? GORDON FELLER: Part of what Geetam has pointed to in terms of the experience of cities that can be brought to the mega-city problem can be brought to the mega-city problems that are now 21st century and unique. There is one piece which is both developed and developing world relevant, and that is the lack of integrated urban planning -- where land use and transportation issues are taken into consideration at the same time; where you build new urban development around transportation hubs and you link those hubs the way Hong Kong has done that successfully. I would argue that yes, we have a completely new situation, but we're also going to face a reality which is not terribly different from the one that Hong Kong addressed as it built the metro system and had a very successful time with that. You (turns to Michael Elliott) live in Hong Kong, and you know that the metro system is a viable solution that prevents lots of problems from arising because there's a long-term investment strategy that linked land use and the master urban plan to the transportation needs of city dwellers. 
(Start of Part 2) MICHAEL HOLMES: I'm curious whether you can 'retro-fit' a city. You want to ride a bicycle in Atlanta? You will probably die. GORDON FELLER: The Chinese don't have to retro-fit. They are building (new) cities around their existing cities. In Chengdu (Click here for external article on Chengdu) - 8.5 million, about to become 15 or 16 million - they are going to build a ring of cities around the existing cities. The question then becomes: in these new towns, will they do the right thing by connecting hub and spoke, around the center of the historically-built Chengdu? You've got 30 to 50 cities in China that are facing that choice. GEETAM TIWARI: I think European cities have been retro-fitted, so we have an example how cities can be retro-fitted. You look at the Netherlands or cities in Denmark, or now present-day German cities. UK cities are investing a lot. In the UK, a white paper (Click here for BBC article explaining white papers) on transport says one of the requirements is that local governments have to show what they're doing for bicycle-friendly infrastructure. Only then they get help from the central government. I think, in this forum, if we're worried about the future of fuel and future of global warming etc, all these other international concerns, I think some of these are future technologies, probably. These are not simple technologies as you said earlier. These are modern future technologies that we will have to learn to imbibe and learn to integrate into our systems. MICHAEL HOLMES: I suppose the metro here is an example of retro-fitting, you could say. How difficult has it been, and how difficult will it be to get people to use it? ELATTUVALAPIL SREEDHARAN: I don't think it will be very difficult, or a real challenge to build a metro or to get people to use this metro. I don't think it will be very difficult. Geetam talked about allowing cyclists and pedestrians in the city. My own assessment is that such large numbers are in the city because they have no other alternatives. (You need a ) good, cheap, available public transport system in the city. 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. Unfortunately we don't have it in the city today. A metro is a very expensive proposition, no doubt, but it is time for it to spread. 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. This has got to be modernized in a big way, strengthened in a very big way. Naturally, the number of cyclists and pedestrians will reduce automatically. This is my own feeling. BILL REINERT: I'm not a metro planner but please let me disagree with you a little bit. When you're talking rail transport you're talking transportation down a corridor. And that's great, and if you can get people to get on that corridor and use it that's really fine. But getting from their house to the corridor, and from the corridor to their house, you're still out in the public, you're still out there with low-speed transportation. It's still going to require some efforts in the city to accommodate mixed-use transportation on the road. It's going to be extremely expensive to got back and retrofit that. You're displacing communities that have been there for many hundreds of years, sometimes. You're stranding infrastructure that in some cases can never be replicated and the economic costs are tremendous in doing that. I definitely advocate looking forward -- how we integrate mass transit into the cities. MICHAEL ELLIOTT: Retro-fitting Los Angeles, which once had - 70 years ago - a spectacular what we would now call light rail system, of streetcars, stretching for hundreds of miles (Click here for external article on history of LA's streetcars), which was then all torn up, building it back again is not an anyone's agenda, right? BILL REINERT: It's not on anyone's agenda. It (light rail) is done in fits and starts - it essentially starts nowhere and goes nowhere in Los Angeles. It's isolated by communities who don't want the light rail passing through. 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 405 (highway) was widened about two years ago, but then people tried to improve their commuting times. The backfill occurred within about six months - it was as congested within six months as it was before they started. And it was an enormous expense to do that. MICHAEL HOLMES: What do you do? Do you let it drift? GORDON FELLER: 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. City forms in the Los Angeles sprawl mode are not going to work. The question is: to what extent is the urban planner sitting with the mayor, sitting with the transportation system designers, sitting with the corporate sector and collaboratively designing a new approach to city forms? Even in an existing city that's thousands of years old. And that's possible. BILL REINERT: Selling that to the voters, though, is important. It's a very difficult task to sell that to the voters, because it's very expensive. MICHAEL ELLIOTT: Because of self-interest, really? It costs them money. GORDON FELLER: But developers will lead the way to densification if you bring them the incentives to do that around transportation hubs. So you build up over the metro stops, you encourage the development of neighborhoods that are revitalized around those metro hubs. Then you're using private capital, and nobody has to underwrite that from a taxpayers' stance. BILL REINERT: Certainly you can see that in Washington DC with the gentrification of the areas around the metro hubs. And the areas that didn't have metro hubs put in, a lot of those areas are in decline now. So what you say is exactly right, Gordon. MICHAEL HOLMES: What happens in a place like Banglalore (Click here for external article on Bangalaore) which, from my discussions here, is a bit of a disaster in terms of how it's grown in an ad hoc sense? GEETAM TIWARI: I think that for all Indian cities, our objective should not be that people should not walk or that there should be less bicycles. I think the future transport scenario has to be how we can manage without fewer two-wheelers and without fewer cars. That should be the objective. So in places like Bangalore also, which is really a two-wheeler dominated city, we will have to think what kind of mass transport system we can plan that gives you the same kind of convenience and flexibility that a two-wheeler is giving you. 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. So now we have to think what kind of mass transport system that we can provide -- that is flexible, that is very reliable. Bangalore is actually one of our initial IT hubs of India. So this is the ideal place where we have to exploit modern information technology in our mass transport system. In some senses if you think, railways technology are at least, I would say, 120, 150 years old. That's when the first metros where built in London and some other places. So I think we will have to do this out-of-the-box thinking. I'll come back to that. We are in the 21st century, so we have to meet the demands of 21st century urbanization. 
(Start of Part 3) MICHAEL ELLIOTT: One of the points that a number of you have made in different contexts is the need to plan. This too sounds blindingly obvious: the need to plan, how we use new technologies, the need to plan urban transportation systems, the need to integrate land use policies with transportation policies and what have you. What I want to ask is this: is the sheer speed of urbanization, particularly in the south, in the developing world, going so fast that it is overtaking the capacity of political leaders to establish plans that can work? ELATTUVALAPIL SREEDHARAN: I think you are very right. The pace of urbanization, particularly in this country, is so fast that we are not able to cope with the other supporting infrastructure that is needed for this urbanization. And of course transportation is one of the most important things. Because mobility is the real life of the city. It is going to be a really major challenge to keep pace with this urbanization and build up the required supporting infrastructure. The planners and the political leadership, they are quite aware of this in this country. They are trying to find solutions for this also. Recently, the government of India has come out with a white paper (Click here for BBC article explaining white papers) laying down transportation policy for such emerging cities. I think if you're successfully able to implement this mission in this white paper, the problems can - mostly -- be solved. This is my own feeling. This is possible. GORDON FELLER: But there is a lack in the planning mode that most cities operate within. There's a planning department within the city government, but there aren't counterpart planners within the corporations that are actually developing the city, and are actively building the city. 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. There's an argument to be made that cities need to get very tough with developers and partner with them around the plan. MICHAEL ELLIOTT: Not just developers, individuals. Individuals want to live in places where they want to live, and they want to travel to places where they want to travel. And they may choose to travel in a car rather than in mass transit, and they may choose to live in riverside places, say 50 miles from downtown LA or 40 miles outside Atlanta rather than in your dense neighborhoods. MICHAEL HOLMES: It's the private sector that drives development, and the market drives growth: so you've got to change the people, at the bottom. GORDON FELLER: But they're given incentives: cheaper housing here is going to drive people in a direction. The power to motivate people's individual consuming decisions - where am I going to live, where am going to work, and how am I going to get from point A to point B - governments and companies that build cities can have a huge impact on the choices that we are all making as the individual buyers of real estate. And those kinds of choices are not being about. (short break in recording) GEETAM TIWARI: Roads are among the most public spaces that are available in cities, and they have become completely out of the control of the public. It is the way roads are developing, the way investment in roads infrastructure is going, it has nothing to do with what the masses of the city want or need. They just don't have any platform. MICHAEL HOLMES: Michael raised a great issue, which is the exponential growth of urbanization. I read a statistic the other day - this is about less-developed countries - that the urban population is expected to go from 1.9 billion, that was in 2000, to 3.9 billion in a matter of a few years. That's people pouring into urban areas. I'm wondering if we're missing something of a core point here: that is, why are they doing that? Should we not be making less urbanized areas more attractive to people? Doesn't information technology, tele-commuting, make that possible? Are we not forgetting about trying to keep people out rather than coping with those that are coming in? GORDON FELLER: Every initiative taken to discourage the flow of people into cities has failed. I think you've had a broad spectrum of initiatives and experiments and incentives. 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. That's where the future of their children is, they see that as the place for economic opportunity. MICHAEL ELLIOTT: And they're liberating, isn't that right? If you move from a village to a city you move out of small confines, social networks, you move away from your family. GORDON FELLER: It was true 100 years ago when my grandparents moved from rural to urban in North America. I suspect it's true in India today with people who are migrating into the cities. MICHAEL HOLMES: But are they economically better off at the end of the day if they come in from a village? GEETAM TIWARI: They are, definitely. All surveys show that people are moving to cities in countries like India because they can find better employment opportunities, and because in cities it is possible to have heterogeneous employment opportunities. An unskilled person can earn a living here as well as a skilled person. MICHAEL HOLMES: Has anyone looked at what the impact of that is on where they came from? GORDON FELLER: They're sending wealth back to the village. When they're making money here they're sending wealth back to the village - it changes the life of the village. BILL REINERT: It improves the life of the village. It's happening in Mexico now, vis a vis the population in California. GEETAM TIWARI: One thing that I think is very interesting about Indian urbanization is that we don't have only big cities growing. In fact the rate of growth of big cities is slowing down in India. The other-level cities, what we call class one, by Indian standards not so big cities up to one million population, the growth is occurring in those cities. And I see this as an opportunity. In India, if you look at the census, the urbanization rate is not very high. In fact in the last decade it has been slowing down, and many economists say it is less than what they expected. This could be a slight cause of worry also. On the other hand I think that we have an opportunity - right now we are at that juncture that we can intervene and make a difference as we can handle this rate of urbanization, where smaller and medium-sized cities are growing. To solve (problems in) those smaller and medium-sized cities would probably be much easier than mega-cities. So if we start focusing our attention to these cities it is going to give us much more benefit than what we may otherwise have. BILL REINERT: That's as long as these satellite cities are connected by viable, probably rail transportation to reduce the impact of individual automobiles and to keep these satellite cities from becoming sprawling suburbs. 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. In fact you brought up (LA) Riverside (Click here for external article on LA's suburbs). Riverside is in fact developing into its own economic area - not just a housing community, but developing jobs and infrastructure, just because they can't get to the LA basin. 
(Start of Part 4) MICHAEL ELLIOTT: Bill, give us a taste of the future. What technologies that we either or know about or vaguely know about, or completely over the horizon, do you think are interesting in terms of transportation? BILL REINERT: I don't mean this to sound as a sales pitch, please believe me. The first thing probably is hybrid technology, as we (Toyota) have developed in the Prius (Click here for Toyota Prius home page). If you consider the hybrid (Click here for external article on hybrid engines) designs -- not linked to a gasoline engine or not linked to a diesel engine, maybe linked to a fuel cell - the hybrid technology is simply a way to capture kinetic energy and store it as chemical energy. When you put the brakes on we turn that into electrical energy and store that into batteries for use later. It almost doubles the efficiency of the overall power train. At Toyota, at Honda and at other folks who are making hybrids we're learning to make them cheaper and lighter. So I think that's one thing you're going to see. I think it's clear you're going to see a great deal of electrification in cars. We're going towards electric transmissions now, we're probably going to have electric motors in the wheels in the next five or 10 years. You're going to be looking at everything in the car being by wire. The idea of a transmission or a differential, they're all going to go away and be replaced by software. It's much easier to reproduce that and much less intensive from an environmental point of view. And you're going to see a huge amount of IT structure integrated into the automobile. In the Prius now we have something like 32 computers running in the car. 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. And then through traffic management systems, the traffic can be routed away from some obstacle. MICHAEL ELLIOTT: So the carrying capacity of the roadway would be increased? BILL REINERT: The existing carrying capacity can be done (increased). MICHAEL ELLIOTT: There was one of your articles about cars that can park themselves (Click here for Bill Reinert's Principal Voices White Paper) and how that might impact on congestion in parking? BILL REINERT: We have that now. In Japan in the Prius now, you can identify a parallel parking spot and press a button on the dashboard and the car will park itself perfectly. You take your hands off the steering wheel and your only job is to touch the brakes and the gas at the appropriate time. I think my wife still might be able to dent a bumper, but...(laughter) And the idea is, you're parking more cars in a smaller space. The idea is that the cars will become more and more electric - and in the case of fuel cells they'll be all electric - you'll have four-wheel steering. So you'll actually be able to make the car go perpendicular to the axis it's aligned to, so it can literally park in a spot that's about 15 to 20 centimeters longer than the whole car itself. So we can condense the parking spaces tremendously, and probably get, not two for one, but one-and-a-half for one. MICHAEL ELLIOTT: Geetam, I was in Bali two weeks ago and one of the things one sees in Bali - and of course many other places in Southeast Asia - is massive use of two-wheeled transportation systems, as you were pointing out, but motorized. Is there interesting technological research going on in making clean, quiet and light motorized two-wheel technology so people don't have to go into the big four-wheeled metal box? GEETAM TIWARI: I don't know. I'm sure there are a lot of manufacturers in India that must be doing it. But the question, if you ask a person like me, a transport planner, should be about promoting two-wheelers in our future cities. It is not just a question of space, it is a question of safety. In an inner-city like Delhi, I think more than 25% of our fatalities are two-wheeler riders. That is why you need this metal around you. The other question is of course about the environment. Suppose we have some fancy technology similar to the hybrid technology for two-wheelers also, I'm sure that is possible. But how do you solve the safety problem? A human body is not designed for that. If you keep it exposed then at high speeds that remains a problem. BILL REINERT: Do you think that if you separated the flows of traffic a bit then the safety would increase? If you had dedicated lanes for two-wheelers and for slow-speed traffic, then that would make things better? GEETAM TIWARI: My understanding is that separation has to be by speed, and a two-wheeler can go almost at the same speed as a car. GORDON FELLER: One thing we haven't talked about, and I hope it comes up in the Q and A, is Bus Rapid Transit (Click here for external site explaining this), which is transforming cities like Mexico City. MICHAEL ELLIOTT: For those of us who aren't familiar with BRT, could you explain it? GORDON FELLER: Dedicated lanes, systems that are smart in the way that people are loaded on very rapidly, with ticket sales that are conducted well ahead of when people are moving onto the vehicle. These can be zero-emission or near zero-emission buses. Some complex cities like Mexico City have taken the lessons from Bogota (Click here for external site on Bogota) and from Curitiba (Click here for external site on Curitiba), who were the developers of the first innovations in BRT. And these are much less costly than the metro solution, which is a very capital-intensive, very politically complex and very long-term project. I think your system (turns to Sreedharan) will finish in 2017? Ok, 2021. BRT systems can be implemented in six months. The question of course is not one or the other, but what mixture in the portfolio. And the real issue is: who gets to decide? In a democracy here -- as opposed to China where you don't really have a democracy and you therefore you have a central decision-making structure at the city level or at the provincial level or at the national level - you want to engage the public in the discussion. And that may be another place where IT can play a role. MICHAEL ELLIOTT: I had a feeling the word democracy would enter these conversations pretty quickly. I certainly hope that as the conversation develops we'll touch on this very tricky question of whether democratic structures, participatory structures, make it easier or harder to take the sort of decisions one has to take to make cities work. GUEST IN AUDIENCE: I've got to go back a bit, to the scale of urbanization. China, where I work, has to build three Great Britains in the next 10 years - the scale of that process is absolutely staggering. And then, to draw the contrast between the new cities that China and indeed India are also building and the solutions that we can find to that, they are fairly straightforward. They are based on a mass transit system - not necessarily rail, perhaps bus transit - and an integrated approach to transport planning. The real dilemma is, what do you do in cities such as Delhi, such as Manila, such as Jakarta, where you have to retro-fit solutions? It's the contrast between the new cities, where I think we have a reasonably good position in solving the problems provided there's resources, the real crux of the issue that I can't see a solution to myself is this: how do you address the problems of Manila? How do you address the problems of Jakarta. They're the really difficult ones. GEETAM TIWARI: New Delhi I find rather simple, because we have 460 kilometers of arterial roads which have more than 30 meters right of way. So immediately we can start having bus priority lanes here. We get an excellent network of 460 kilometers at maybe one 20th of the cost of any other mass transport system. MICHAEL HOLMES: Doesn't that encourage more cars as well? GEETAM TIWARI: No. The amazing fact is that this is the only system which will not encourage more cars. Because, on the same road you were going to drive, now you will have segregated, reserved lanes for buses. So car people, with all their modern technology, nice music and air conditioning, they can sit in congestion and see a bus whizzing past. In Bogota, car people switched to public transport. Otherwise, when you take rail-based public transport, international data shows that it is very difficult for car users to switch. MICHAEL HOLMES: A lot of that goes back to convenience, and again I go back to my own experience in Atlanta where the system is terrible in terms of its reach. And to get to the rail station, that's the problematic part of it. And I can't be bothered. What's happening here (Delhi) with your system? Is it accessible? ELATTUVALAPIL SREEDHARAN: Well, we are trying to make it accessible. At all the metro stations we are building parking areas and we are introducing what is known as a metro link - bus feeder services from the residential areas tom metro stations. Today it is manageable, it is not difficult. I think the system will work when it is introduced for the entire metro system. MICHAEL HOLMES: Can it be done in Manila or Jakarta? ELATTUVALAPIL SREEDHARAN: Manila is difficult, it is already very, very congested. But is would be possible. The BRT, definitely, will have very dominant role because it is possible, and it is one of the priorities today. But a number of system are required. BRT alone cannot solve the entire problems of a city. I still feel that a metro has to be the real backbone of mobility in a city, and BRT in other areas. A metro can't cover the whole city. In a city like Madrid the metro system has spread so much that there is a metro station within 500 meters of anybody's place or work or place of residence. It's very difficult to get to that state. A lot of feeder services are required, routes have to be covered by other modes of transportation and a city like Delhi, which has a population of 14 million and which is likely to increase to 20 million by 2020, will need a number of modes of transportation. They have got to be integrated, a common ticketing system is required, a common authority to control all the systems is required. I think the government is facing the problem and they are moving in that direction. (Start of Part 5) MICHAEL HOLMES: China was raised before. I think it's interesting to have another statistic: in 1950 China had 13 cities with a million people. It now has 109 cities with a million people. That is staggering. I want to hear about this citing rising from nothing. How does it work? GORDON FELLER: The experiment hasn't quite begun yet. Planning is underway and we have a mayor who is more than co-operative. We have a partner in the university who is leading the charge as the non-governmental partner. We have corporate developers. The notion is a city that is about to double in size needs to have an experiment that can take a neighborhood of 250,000 and grow with zero waste, zero footprint. MICHAEL HOLMES: How are you going to do that? GORDON FELLER: Part of the question is really: can you not do it? Because the (electricity) grid can't support the growth that's coming. So you're going to have to build communities that are off the grid, which means they generate their own power, they clean their own water, they have bio-gas - every time a toilet flushes there's an opportunity to light a lamp or light a stove. The bottom line is that we're going to have to experiment with these things and make them happen. So, the University of California (Click here for university homepage), Berkeley is going to be bringing advanced science to the project, the National Academy of Sciences (Click here for Academy homepage) in Washington DC is going to be a participant. It'll be an interesting story. It's a multi-year project and 250,000 people are going to get the chance to be guinea pigs. MICHAEL HOLMES: When do you hope it'll be done? GORDON FELLER: Probably in five years. GUEST IN AUDIENCE: What Geetam Tiwari says rings a bell with me. When I was in Delhi I would take a lot of bicycle expeditions. But now, if I wanted to commit suicide I would go on a bicycle in.the city. A bicycle is the most efficient form of transportation either designed by man or nature. Also, what is the ideal size for a city? As I see it, the ideal size is under five million. MICHAEL HOLMES: Is that something that can be controlled? How do you stop a city becoming greater than five million? GORDON FELLER: Disincentives. Disincentives for the builders to build the structures, the built environment becomes more costly. There are soft mechanisms to reduce the growth of the city but it takes a level of political will which most public leaders don't have. MICHAEL HOLMES: And you're still left with the cities that have already become the mega-cities; the Delhis, the Bombays, Calcutta, Jakarta, Manila... GEETAM TIWARI: I would like to give another perspective on this. How do you define the size of the city? I would argue that Delhi is many cities put together in close geographical proximity. Because the majority of the people are not doing long trips. I live in south Delhi. It's a very small city for me, it's very seldom I go elsewhere. It is your basically travel patterns which is defining your city sizes. It is different from other places as they all have contiguous geographical boundaries. GORDON FELLER: Do you think the city should change the governing structure to accommodate for the fact that south Delhi is really a distinct city, and it shouldn't be a mega-governing structure but a distinct structure? GEETAM TIWARI: Both are needed because at one level you are dealing with these small segments. However, they do have common boundaries and you would have to deal with how this interaction is going to take place. And many of the new mega-cities are like this. BILL REINERT: You can see that Delhi or any big city is a cluster of suburbs, and for personal transportation it is easy to understand how that can become self sustained. However, that doesn't account for moving goods and services back and forth between the transportation hub, which is a whole another issue, and the commerce between these boroughs. GUEST IN AUDIENCE: We have to define what the transportation problem is in the mega-cites, and what the transportation issue is in the smaller and medium towns, where the problem is to provide low income transportation options for a large middle class, which is growing in this country. There is what urban economists call the local worker model. You encourage firms, give them incentives to locate where clusters of people with certain skills are located. For example, in IIT Delhi, (and) IIM Lucknow, where I was teaching, you have on-campus housing. and Infosys has large residential campuses. So the local worker model is one way of looking at the urban transportation as a solution and which minimizes the work trips. On another subject, I lived in the United States for 10 years, and when I was there I tied to make car pooling (Click here for external site explaining car pooling) work, but never could. I think car pooling is a very cultural phenomenon, and I think car pooling in cities in India will work because Indian people tend to be more accommodative and more social and more dependant on others. So I think car pooling in an Indian mega-city context would work. Car-pooling could work in the context of a mega-city, the local worker model could work in the context of mega-cities, but I think in the case of small and medium towns the question is how can we provide low-cost transport options for the low-income and middle-income classes. I don't think the metro model would work there. Outside of a mega-city, even in Bangalore for example, what would determine the success of a metro? ELATTUVALAPIL SREEDHARAN: I would advocate a metro only in corridors where the transportation need is more than say, 15,000 to 20,000 PSPDT, what we call peak hour peaked action traffic. When that level of traffic is needed only a metro is justified. Otherwise no. Now when that level of traffic need is there, no other system is going to work. Either a BRT (bus rapid transit) cannot work or any other system is going to work. So a metro is inevitable. What we are trying to do today is that we have this volume of traffic for a city like Bangalore, (in) certain corridors. We are trying to carry on with all sorts of modes of transport and making the roads completely congested. A horrible situation we have created. We can bring some order to these 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. This is what I would like to advocate. |
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