Principal Voices Mexico City Round-Table - Debate Quotes
Dr. Ellatuvalapil Sreedharan
In India the Government projects are notorious for cost overruns and time overruns.
I don't think we can duplicate one metro exactly in another country, it's not worth attempting it.
Before you bring in congestion charges, the city must have a very efficient public transport system.
It was basically for the lower and middle class people that the Delhi metro was built. To attract the upper class people who own cars is rather difficult in the Indian situation today because cars are a sort of prestige symbol.
The metro has to be very efficient, very comfortable, quite safe and of course very reliable, and it must cover the whole city.
In India the government has taken a policy decision that all cities with more than 3 million population, to start with, will have a metro system in the next five to ten years time. Thereafter, even cities with more than one million should have a metro system.
A metro system cannot be justified purely on financial grounds, but it can be easily justified on socio-economic grounds.
Hugh Somerville
The aviation industry is perhaps the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas within the transport sector which is the fastest growing in its turn contributor to climate change.
Aviation faces particular difficulties because its affect on the climate is not the same as terrestrial sources because the emissions are emitted at cruise altitudes.
Some people have said that the effect of (aircraft-generated) cirrus cloud alone could be as great as that of the carbon dioxide that's emitted from industry.
The one measure that will contribute more in the medium term than anything else is emissions trading. That's a firm belief of a lot of people across the industry and it's something that we hope will happen in Europe by 2008.
It's a sad observation that most people when they embark on a journey by air, seem to throw their environmental credentials out the window.
A recent survey in the UK said that 80% of people like to recycle at home but only 20% of them want to recycle when they are on holiday.
Before the industrial revolution man was dependant on his own horse or wind and current to get around the world and apart from allegations that horse manure made the city centres very unpleasant in these times, there were no real environmental problems associated with it.
The aviation industry.......will need to be looking at things like emissions trading and maybe over ten, twenty, thirty, forty years, radical changes in technology perhaps even into hydrogen fuelled aircraft and things like that.
In flight re-fuelling on long haul flights would make aviation more efficient, even formation flying like geese could be possible because there are so many aircraft that fly across the Atlantic at any one time.
Taxes are very poor ways of improving environmental performance. The price of fuel for an aircraft has virtually doubled recently and it's had no effect on demand.
Adriana Lobo
We spend every day in transportation here in Mexico City, two and a half hours in average 10% of all our time is spent just trying to move
Two thousand or three thousand people a day in Mexico City are dying faster because of pollution.
We have to have transport systems that are designed for everybody
Walking was a very important activity for us to be healthy. When we were walking to work or walking to someplace we were healthy and today we do not move our bodies and we are getting fat and diabetes and other health problems.
Local transportation is said to be a public service by law and this is a very important concept, a very important duty of the state
Claudia Sheinbaum
Transportation is not only how people move from one place to another. It deals with many issues. It deals with the economy, with social issues, with the environment.
Some people approach subsidies as if they were the devil or something like that. "I don't want to talk about subsidies, I don't want to hear about subsidies!" When you have a population such as that of Mexico City where around 30% of the people live under the poverty line then you look at subsidies from a different perspective.
If you say build a metro and you will have the demand, this is not always true. You need to build a public transport system, and a public transport system is not just metro. It's metro and it's buses and it's probably taxis for some areas of the city.
