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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) |
 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 (Start of Part 6) 
MICHAEL HOLMES: I moved house because my commute was becoming 50 minutes to an hour. I think it is a fascinating aspect, but not really resolved, this balance between private enterprise developers (and city planners). Developers want to make money, they are not altruistic about urbanization and planning. How does that balance with Hong Kong work? GORDON FELLER: Look at Hong Kong -- the Hong Kong story is a city that basically saw its real estate values were going to be attracted to the places that people could get to easily, and developers responded to the incentives that were provided by the government -- because the government was financing the metro system. And lo and behold, real estate prices around the metros have significantly increased. There is no reason in the world why a city can't decide that it's going to use the forces in the marketplace to the advantage of transportation, particularly where they are going to use their land use planning and their transportation planning not as separate compartmentalized silos but as an integrated package. MICHAEL ELLIOTT: I live in Hong Kong -- or try and live in Hong Kong. I spend most of my time living courtesy of Cathay Pacific and British Airways, and I think that everything that you have described about Hong Kong is correct. But you do have a rather unique set of circumstances in Hong Kong. You have an executive-like government with frankly limited public participation in the planning process and you have a traditionally very closed and mutually beneficial, most of the time, relationship between the city government and the few very large property developers who know each other very well and do talk to each other the whole time. So there is a kind paradigm that has made for Hong Kong's integration of transport and land development work very well but which might be harder to replicate in other places. GORDON FELLER: There are other examples where we don't have that peculiar political culture. San Francisco has had a lot of success mixing the creative use of land and developer inputs with mass transit solutions that encourage people to get out of their cars. I think there are quite a few cities which have tried to harness the forces of the marketplace for the purpose of the larger and greater good. MICHAEL ELLIOTT : I don't want to lose the cultural point on car pooling.I am just putting this on the table - by taking the specific example that Indians may be better at car pooling than Ohians are, I think you make a very large point, which is that individuals have different preferences for how they would like to live and move. One of the interesting things about these discussions is that we dream of solutions and incentives, and I understand that we can incentivize people and nudge behavior, but people have very different individual preferences for the way in which they like to live and move. MICHAEL HOLMES: And a lot of Americans do not like to be told what to do. And how many people on that freeway that you have been on, how many of those cars have more than one person? BILL REINERT: That's not the issue. I don't believe that it's a cultural issue, about car pooling versus non car pooling. I think that you are going to find out in India as you adopt an integrated information technology point of view that that is not a fixed schedule and if you work in an environment where there is no fixed schedule it completely forecloses your car pooling opportunity -- unless you are willing to put two hours on either side of your work day for the benefit of society. The other thing I will say is that I have car pooled for many years, and you get tired of hearing the same stories. It's the same amount of time in the car, 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. GEETAM TIWARI: I would agree with this. In fact, the car technology, the reason we buy a car is that we want to travel alone and listen to our music alone. The other point that was raised is the local workers model. A low income solutions which exists in most of our cities, but our planners want to destroy it. An example is that in Delhi, the reason a lot of people live in what we call informal sectors or unauthorized colonies is so they can walk to work, so they are very close to their place of employment. So the local worker model already exists in most Indian cities. By planning now, we are saying that we want to clean the city and de-congest the city, so send these people 20, 30 kilometers away. So that option of walking to work or bicycling to work is finished. On the one hand we say that we want sustainable mobility and we are worried about the environment, pollution and fuel consumption etc, and also we want better economic growth etc. But at the same time, by planning we are forcing people to spend more money on transport, have more vehicles on the road and the roads are already congested. I would say what is happening is in self-organizing communities, because planners don't have any answers, and we continually refuse to even acknowledge that these are real solutions. GUEST IN AUDIENCE: I would like to address the issue of accessibility and universal design in public transportation systems. We are talking about urbanization and MRT (mass rapid transit) systems and BRT (Click here for external site explaining Bus Rapid Tansit) systems, but we are not addressing the needs of people. If we talk about India, we have 16% of senior citizens who are ageing, and then there is an increase of disabled persons adding the population to 26%. Then we have persons with reduced mobility -- families with young children and people with temporary ailments -- and this comprises of a segment of almost 40% to 50%. But how many of them are easily able to use the public transportation system? So if we talk about urbanization and if we talk about sustainability in the public transport system, we have to look at possibility of providing accessibility in the system. Here I would like to congratulate the MRT system, the Delhi metro system (Click here for Delhi Metro homepage). In the planning stage itself the accessibility features were put in, and also in the BRT system which is coming up we have the low-floor buses and also the bus queue shelters which are designed to have accessibility features right from the beginning. ELATTUVALAPIL SREEDHARAN: The fears or reservation that she has expressed, I think the Delhi metro is taking care of them, and it is necessary to look after these concerns -- there is no doubt about it. I think the Delhi metro is taking care of it splendidly well. MICHAEL HOLMES: On car pooling, how about the way we drive in different countries. Is enforcement an option? GEETAM TIWARI: 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. So if you a given a road where people are walking, people are bicycling, and these different speeds are mixing together, you will drive like an Indian, you will do what we call space sharing, not lane driving. Wherever you find spaces you go and occupy them. That's the logic you have to use here. Therefore, if you change the physical infrastructure design, if you are separating slow-moving traffic, and if you have buses that have to stop every 500 meters to pick up people and you separate them then obviously people start seeing different kinds of driving habits and different kinds of enforcement issues. 
(Start of Part 7) GUEST IN AUDIENCE: The point I would like to make is that we've got to look at planning in a regional or sub-regional context. The way our road development is taking place, a lot of development is taking place in long corridors. So if you look at a sub-regional plan you would then be able to take the pressure off. some of the mega-cities or some of the cities that will become mega-cities, in terms of developing corridors. Corridors are currently based on road transportation, but wherever you have high densities of transport from satellite cities or cities along corridors to a mega-city you could have a metro system. But by and large, if you look at the profile of the population and the way the country is developing, you have a very big informal sector. Today, 92% of the workforce is employed in the informal sector, and in terms of the contribution to the GDP is about 53%. So if you look at that you realize that with workplaces based on slum redevelopment, you develop your low-income settlements to cater for transportation, for providing workplaces and selling places. If you have that focus, that the majority of people are in a certain income bracket, you would be able to do your transport planning much better. The pace of urbanization in the larger cities has slowed down, that's the demographic detail. So we've got to see how we make the smaller and medium cities more livable, and see that the march of urbanization is arrested are in those cities, and the urban corridors are linked with mega-cities where certain opportunities exist. The second thing is about moving goods and services. In a large city you have to move large good and services. And if you could use certain parts of metro system for free traffic, for medium-weight freight traffic, you could take care of that. So I would say that a multi-model transport system with emphasis on a rapid bus system for most of the areas or most of the corridor pockets, integrated with non-motorized transport and for transport on two-wheelers would probably be the answer. GORDON FELLER: Just one comment. We recently looked at the experience in cluster cities -- I think we did in six or seven countries -- we looked at how cities on a regional and a sub-regional bases are learning from each other. This is a theme that we have to think more about:encouraging city-to-city learning, whether in that region or perhaps across big distances. Lot of cities are experimenting -- making investments, trying to do new approaches -- and we don't really have many good modalities to encourage city-to-city learning. It happens most effectively when you are at the same geography, but we are trying to encourage city-to-city learning across large distances; the Chinese can learn with the American experience to prevent sprawl. MICHAEL ELLIOTT: And is that happening? GORDON FELLER: It is. There are a couple of organizations we are now working with, like the World Association of Major Metropolises (Click here for Association homepage), the 100 largest cities in the world, where mayors get together and compare notes. And now they are reaching out to the cities around them, to bring them into the conversation. Another organization called the United Cities and Local Governments (Click here for organization homepage), they have I think 8,000 cities that are members. So there is some city-to-city learning taking place, and I think this notion of regional plans that can effectively look at the linkages between the secondary cities to the mega-cites is something we have to do a lot more of. MICHAEL ELLIOTT: I've been very struck by a high-profile experiment in a very well-known city -- I've been very struck by what appears to be tremendous international interest in congestion charging in London (Click here for BBC article explaining congestion charge). People seem to be in London all the time, looking at it and seeing if it's working. GORDON FELLER: The mayor of San Francisco was just there; he told us that they were going to be implementing something very fast. MICHAEL HOLMES: How is it working in London? GORDON FELLER: Well, after the political storm subsided, I think it's fair to say that it's a success. And now they've extended the geography and they're doing this graduated pricing structure which incentivizes people to think very carefully about where they are going to go and how they are going to get there. BILL REINERT: Have they gone to time-of-day rates in pricing in London? GORDON FELLER: Well. Singapore has, but not London. BILL REINERT: London does have has a discount for very clean cars, or cars like the Prius (Click here for Toyota Prius home page). MICHAEL HOLMES: Hybrid (Click here for external article on hybrid engines) cars in the US are allowed to go in the high-occupancy lane even with one person. In Athens they went for the odd and even license plate methods which completely failed because people just bought different cars. MICHAEL ELLIOTT: Many more questions -- there's a gentleman in the back who is really trying hard; I thought he'd given up but he hasn't. GUEST IN AUDIENCE: The question comes back to the issue of public participation. In countries that are democracies, what are the key kinds public participation needs that seem to have emerged from historical experience. And related to that is the question of resources. For major urban transportation projects, what is experience - do the resources come from the area or are they drawn in from the rest of the country? MICHAEL ELLIOTT: First the question of democracy and participation, and what are the optimal conditions for democratic participation in these issues. Singapore or Manila? And then secondly resources, and whether people outside the city should be expected to contribute? GORDON FELLER: I'd just say there is a link between the two, which is when people are taxed they are essentially voting. And they are voting in a way that is sometimes coerced. The the question is, as we say in the United States, do you vote the bastards out of office because the tax was not something you wanted? The tax will be passed not on a referendum basis. The question then becomes, do those elected leaders, because they stuck their necks out and wanted to provide mass transit solutions, get their necks chopped off? MICHAEL HOLMES: And then a government is less likely to raise taxes to do the right thing in a long-term? I mean, that's democracy. BILL REINERT: Part of that is we do a particularly poor job educating or preparing society for these things. It's not very easy to do - we're probably going to see a transition from a petroleum economy to another kind of economy in the next 30 or 40 years, and we are doing a particularly poor job in preparing society for these kinds of transitions, moves. GORDON FELLER: Investing the resources in a post-carbon transportation system is a trillion-dollar worldwide undertaking, and this another place where US leadership is lacking. MICHAEL ELLIOTT: Geetam, you made a point earlier about the importance of participation in these discussions. But let me play devil's advocate -- doesn't public participation, doesn't widespread consultation exercises slow decision-making down? Don't we want 100 Singapores in Asia, where decisions are taken and effected and implemented quickly? GEETAM TIWARI: Well, my answer is that we definitely don't want 100 Singapores. Because you are right that public participation in democracies slows down the process, but I think that is what we need to arrive at better solutions. We do have from history the understanding that Curitba (Click here for external site on Curitiba) happened because of Jaime Lerner (Click here for external profile of Jaime Lerner), and Bogota (Click here for external site on Bogota) happened because of Enrique Penalosa (Click here for external profile of Enrique Penalosa). Those are good projects - democratically elected but not so much public participation in the decision-making process. But they were both democratically elected. However, if in places like Delhi or other cities we have taken a long time debating within bureaucracies, with technical experts, I think it's worth it. Because eventually we need more of it. I think the reason that we are not arriving at more desirable solutions quickly is because we do not have enough participation. Within our democracy, we don't have any platforms where almost 50% of the city residents can come and demand: ‘This is what we need.' Their voices are not being heard. So I would go for a slow process with more public participation because that is what is going to give us good solutions and good processes to arrive at better solutions. 
(Start of Part 8) GUEST IN AUDIENCE: The dimension I would like to talk about is road safety education. Why we don't look sufficiently at this? There has been a lot of investment in manpower and resources for road safety enforcement and surveillance, but what about education? Ninety thousand people die on India's roads every year, that's 245 a day. Who's responsible? GORDON FELLER: If you look to the Vietnam experience, the fascinating thing they did is that they said to the employers: ‘You are the ones who are responsible, if you own the vehicle your are going to be penalized if one of your drivers is in an accident. And lo and behold the insurers, who the employers were turning to for a little bit of solace, pointed them back in the right direction and said: ‘We're not going to take the responsibility and we're not going to make this insurable.' So the Vietnamese companies said this to their employees, even when the employees were not driving for the company at that moment, they were simply going from home to work, they employers really took leadership. I don't know if it would work in India. But I get the sense that employers in India are very strong, they are very interested in human capital, they spend a lot of money. They spend a lot of money training their people - they don't want them to have head injuries.. So maybe a strategy could be where the government essentially creates a partnership as they did in Vietnam, with the private sector to move towards safety practices. GEETAM TIWARI: I would like to add that road safety education has been talked about since 1939, when the first motor vehicles act was done. And it is not only in India - internationally since 1939, up to 1965 when the NHTSA (Click here for NHTSA homepage) was set up in the US, this is all they did. And the fatalities kept rising. No matter what kind of safety education you do. Even in Vietnam the fatalities are increasing. There is not one single country where if you do road safety education, fatalities have come down. There is a lot of literature about that, and the latest by WHO (Click here for WHO homepage) - a review of road safety education - which shows that if road safety education is done in isolation, without making changing in infrastructures, without making changes to vehicle design, without making changes in your legislation and other institutional set-ups, it has zero effect. Many times it has been found to have negative effect. There are very scientifically done studies from Sweden and the UK which both show there are more children get involved in accidents after going to road safety education. It's a very tricky thing. The bottom line is, if we don't make changes in our physical infrastructure and vehicle design then safety education won't have any effect whatsoever. It should be after everything else. The reason I am saying this is that it is all we have been doing all these years. A lot of people start thinking, this is easy, let's do it first, so you invest all your energies, all your efforts, into this, which actually has a very low return. GUEST IN AUDIENCE: I want to say that I want to keep my car. I live in Delhi and I'm happy to keep my car. The danger of the discussion we're having is, it seems we're discussing the options for people improving things for those who don't have the option of owning a car. I have the opportunity of living in six or so big cities and only twice -- London and Yokohoma -- did I opt no to have a car. Both times it was not the incentives like great urban housing - it was not the carrot it was the stick, it was the costs, the obstacles, the headaches. BILL REINERT: I agree with you 100%. A lot of our conversation was swimming upstream against demographics and emerging economies. The facts are clear -- as economies emerge, people want to adopt OECD (Click here for OECD homepage) levels of automobile ownership. To pretend that's not going to happen and to pretend that we're going to somehow legislate that away is turning your back on the problem. MICHAEL ELLIOTT: That brings us back to something we touched on very briefly earlier - ethanol, hydrogen.Is there enough being done, is there a willingness? GORDON FELLER: There is R & D money, Toyota is probably the leader in investing in renewable fuel alternatives for vehicles - more so than the US Department of Energy and the federal government of the United States, which is a bit of a shock. The reality is that we're years away. But the demand side is growing sufficiently that companies and governments partnering each other is an unavoidable reality. Cities are saying: ‘We want to buy the fleets, to create the demand curve that will make the pricing go down.' Because cities, individually or collectively, are acting as agents of change by saying: ‘Our city-owned fleet, when we purchase it, is going to have to be zero-emission.' That may be years away, but they are able to say to a car company: ‘Your investment is secure because we're going to be the ones who are going to help you get a return.' MICHAEL HOLMES: The democratic aspect in that is interesting because you are saying that is happening despite the government. BILL REINERT: All the talk about alternative fuels and hydrogen, that's all great, but the fact of the matter is we're going to spend 1.5 trillion dollars in the next 15 or 20 years just to improve the up-stream oil infrastructure, and another 500 billion downstream to improve the refineries. That's going to happen. The problem that we've got about 85 million barrels per day of oil consumption today, and in the next 10 or 15 years we're probably going to move that figure up to about 110 or 115 million. Simply, there's not the land use availability for ethanol. We can't cut down enough rainforests for oil palms for biodiesel. There's not the hydrogen production capability, if we're going to keep increasing demand at two percent a year. That's the monster in the closet that nobody wants to talk about -- the pretence that we can keep growing at two percent a year and somehow wave our magic bio-fuels wand and everything will be better. That's not going to happen. MICHAEL HOLMES: That's scary. So what are you saying - we need to actually reduce energy useage? BILL REINERT: We need to start reducing the energy intensiveness per person - not per GDP. Don't get caught in this, Everybody says the United States is less energy intensive per GDP. That just means we've gone from a manufacturing economy to and information economy. GORDON FELLER: Which, by the way, makes urbanization is a net positive, as we are densifying the cities. You're making those cities more energy efficient, particularly if the city is rethinking the way the built environment is designed. You can do sprawl with urbanization or you can do densification, which means greater energy efficiency, which means probably reducing global demand. When you're moving from 85 million (barrels of oil) per day to 110, you can reduce that curve if the urbanization process continues, and you get cities leading the way to changing the form of the city. GEETAM TIWARI: I would like to go back to this comment about the desire of keeping the car because you like it. I think that is fine. Such people should always buy better cars, and there are a lot of people working on this technology. They should do it. But then you (Reinert) talked about giving choices. Our concern is that by addressing this in Delhi, we have only 15% of the households who own cars. And that is what we keep doing - addressing their concerns. They are ruling out choices for the remaining 85%. People who want to walk, and they have to walk, and people who have to use bicycles or public transport systems, we're ruling out all those choices for them. So, if we talk about democratic structures and processes we will have to move away from this. I think we have already invested more energy, more finances to this minority in many of our cities GUEST IN AUDIENCE: I would like to touch a bit on road safety education. The forecasts are that fatalities in developed nations are going to go down by 23% by 2020, whereas in the developing world they will go up by 80-odd percent. So there is something they (developed nations) are doing right. On another point, I think the solutions have to come out of mass transit systems, properly organized, cost-effective and time-effective solutions. MICHAEL ELLIOTT: Is the Delhi metro (Click here for Delhi Metro homepage) comfortable? It's important, correct? ELATTUVALAPIL SREEDHARAN: It is not only comfortable, it is safe, it's reliable and it's fast. MICHAEL HOLMES: How successful is it? Are there enough stations to make it feasible for the average New Delhi resident? ELATTUVALAPIL SREEDHARAN: Today it is confined to a small area of the city. But in that area it is a wonderful service. We are transporting about 450,000 passengers a day. GUEST IN AUDIENCE: I would also like to touch on road safety education. I agree that it doesn't work to put our investment in education, but it works if you put efforts into road education and other things like engineering and enforcement. It's very important for democratic societies because they (people) will make better decisions. I see people requesting politicians to have a road just in front of a school because they think it is convenient for their children -- they didn't know about the consequences of the road traffic injuries that would follow. Many people put children on motorcycles, not knowing they are not allowed to do this. So road safety education is still important even though is not the single factor. 
(Start of Part 9) ANOTHER GUEST: The future has to look at public transport systems which match the marginal cost of two-wheeler use. Anything above that will do great harm to India's cities. We keep talking about technology. In my view the metro is an absolute waste. ELATTUVALAPIL SREEDHARAN: Well, I wouldn't say it's a waste. I am only pleading for a metro in corridors where no other transport systems can carry that level of traffic. There are corridors in Delhi where the traffic level is more than 15,000 or 30,000 PSPDT. I don't think any other system can carry that level of traffic. And we are not talking about the metro merely for today, we are talking about 50 years for the city.I am not saying we should not invest in BRT (Click here for external site explaining Bus Rapid Tansit), or other modes. But in a major city like Delhi the metro has to be the backbone of transportation. The other systems can be feeder services. 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 (costs). Where the metro has come, the (house) prices have gone up, people become rich in that area. The rate of return to society, that is more important. The economic rate of return for the metro in Delhi is 23.5%, which means any investment we are making in the metro will come back to society in about four-and-a-half years time. Is this a waste? So let us not rule out the metro, it is necessary. But a metro is not the only solution, I admit that. GEETAM TIWARI: I would suggest it has to be the other way round. Road-based public transport systems will remain the backbone of most cities, and for long trips I would say railway systems will play some role. And since those (rail journeys) are only a small proportion of our total trips it cannot be the backbone. ELATTUVALAPIL SREEDHARAN: But road systems cannot carry the traffic. GEETAM TIWARI: But I can contest your numbers. Bogota today is carrying 45,000 passengers per hour. It is a comparison to Delhi as it has seven million in population, and the streets are not very different. In Delhi, it would be very simple on a 30-meter right of way to have buses. You could carry 20,000 to 25,000 persons per hour in each direction. The capacity numbers are in terms of details: how you design your traffic signals, and how many. That's the numbers (of passengers) Mexico City is showing - it is already carrying more than 20,000. Those numbers are available from many other different experiences. BILL REINERT: BRT (bus rapid transit) has not reduced congestion in Mexico City. Mexico City is still one of the most congested cities in the world. BRT some day may do it, but it has to come with the elimination of the other bus services that run right behind BRT - I think there's five or seven of them now, or something like that. The fact of the matter is that yes, we can probably say that roadways will be the predominant way in the future, but we're ignoring the fact that roads are enormously expensive to expand. There's electrical infrastructure that runs alongside the rights of way, there's drainage, there's water, there's an incredible amount of work to expand the roadways to carry additional capacity. GEETAM TIWARI: Actually, in Delhi our calculations are showing that if you do all that, rearrange electric services and all the other services which are running along the roads, have really beautiful pedestrian parts, new pedestrian lighting, which has never been done in cities like Delhi, that is going to cost one 15th, one 20th of the cost of putting in a metro system per kilometer. GUEST IN AUDIENCE: We have to look in terms of totality - how all these forms of transport are organized. A sustainable transport system has to be environmentally friendly and useful for society. We also have to consider all forms of personal transport, like bicycles and rickshaws. (break in tape) ANOTHER GUEST IN AUDIENCE: We are discussing all this as through cities are going to grow and grow. Will they stabilise? How far and when will they stabilise? Our own gut feeling is that other than these three main cities, Calcutta, Delhi and Mumbai, there are probably four more cities which will cross the 10 million mark. Also, it's not so much the population growth we have to worry about but how the space is growing. Finally, given that we are spending public money on transport, what should be the priorities? (Start of Part 10) MICHAEL HOLMES: I'm wondering, as time winds down, whether we can get some thoughts from each of our Principal Voices on what we have heard today, perhaps where do we go from here? What have we learned? I think I've learned there are a lot of universal principles when it comes to dealing with urbanization, but what we're hearing today is that there is a need for very much local solutions when it comes to these issues, too. GORDON FELLER: I'm thinking about the Ahmedabad (Click here for external site on Ahmedabad) story and what Keshav Varma (Click here for extrenal profile of Keshav Varma) did when he was Mayor. This is a fascinating story - if people who are not living in India don't know the Varma story, here's a man who essentially stuck his neck out, tried to do some things for Ahmedabad that hadn't been done before. You could say the city was a mess when he arrived. And when he left, the city was a real beacon of hope. What he brought was a combination of things that we're going to need to have in any city in the world that's facing these kinds of urbanization and transportation development challenges. He brought the willingness to try something very new, he brought the ability to bring different constituencies together around that vision and then he recruited partners. And the city government had partners, and the private sector, the university sector, the national government. There aren't a lot of people like Keshav Varma who are going to take a city like Ahminebad and turn it around, but frankly if we don't find those kinds of leaders who can galvanize a constituency and a coalition in these cities, I'm worried. I think they're there. The leaders are there, the question is will they emerge to take charge? MICHAEL HOLMES: On that point, what happens if those people don't emerge, what if we just carry on? GORDON FELLER: I think those cities will drift into a much tougher future, and eventually it'll have to happen because people will take charge of their lives. As you've been making the point all morning, these people who are living in these cities are making choices every day about how they're going to get to work, about what kind of place they're going to live in or where they're going to live. So those choices can be funneled, and leaders can lead people to new choices, but drift is not an answer. ELATTUVALAPIL SREEDHARAN: Each city must have its own typical solution. One solution will not be applicable to all the cities. But when the size of the city is more than 5 million population, I think a major MRT solution is essential for the city. This is what I am trying to establish. For an MRT system -- in India we have seen that -- the most useful, safe, viable option is an metro like what we have in Delhi. There are other types of metros also. There are light metros, medium metros - any of these can be chosen as the main transport mode for a city. And of course, this has got to be integrated with other modes of transport in the city. In the final reckoning, I would finally say that mobility in the city is the most important thing to be catered for in planning a city -- this is very important, because it decides the quality of life in the city, ultimately. GEETAM TIWARI: Actually, big cities don't continue to grow, they do stabilize. we have the example that Mexico City was projected to be 30 million -- it didn't become 30 million. It has kind of stabilized around 21, 22 million. And I think they are going to see similar things happening in India, also. But I think I will come to back the point that I made initially -- how we deal with urbanization and people living in these cities. We will have to take a different paradigm shift, we will have to adopt that. You (Gordon Feller) talked about leadership. My pitch is that we will have to find processes instead of waiting for leaders. As democracies we have to find processes where most people can participate and their concerns can be heard. Only then we are moving towards more desirable solutions. I think the backbones of all cities, whether medium-sized cities or big cities, both in India and China, will have to be modern technology, information technology-based road systems coupled with how we deal with pedestrian access, access to mobility, handicapped people, all of these we will have to integrate. In some senses we are talking about an inclusive city, that is what a modern city is. BILL REINERT: I think we have seen today, and Gordon has pointed it out a lot, that cities throughout the world have similar problems, but these problems are going to be resolved in entirely different manners. The focus is going to be different depending on regional problems and regional geography. Rail transportation is a wonderful solution when you've got a corridor type of geography. In fact, in Los Angeles or in California, about 90% of the state lives in an area that is about 400 miles long and about 50 miles wide. So it's perfect for rail transportation -- we don't use it but it's perfect Second of all you're going to have to start separating vehicle traffic by speed and by use. You're not going to be able to continue to move goods and services with individualized, private transportation, and with low-speed bicycles and rickshaws. That has to be done, and that has to be done regardless of how you do it Finally, I think we are going to use IT to greatly increase securing the capacity of our existing infrastructure. I'm very interested in the point that was pointed out here about mobility. My sister has muscular dystrophy, none of the mass transit I see is particularly (useful for her). In a lot of cases we can make it accessible but it's not generally, and I think we need to do a whole lot better than that because we're all going to get older, we're going to lead a lot longer lives and we're going to have mobility problems as that occurs. MICHAEL ELLIOTT: We have had an absolutely fantastic morning. We've had a fabulous discussion. I've enjoyed it enormously, we've had tremendous contributions from our four panelists. I'd like to thank them very, very much for the time they have spent preparing for this, and the contributions that they have made. I'd like to thank our audience, too, for their contributions to this debate. |
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