Where is the space for all the vehicles?

IT IS not just the pollution they cause or the heavy foreign exchange outgo on providing fuel to them that should make one think twice about continuing with automobiles as a means of personal transport in India. There is another scarce resource in the country that is being rapidly gobbled up by the automobile - land in urban areas.

If you think this is an exaggeration, just ask the residents of Greater Kailash or any of the other New Delhi residential areas. Over the years, particularly since the advent of Maruti, automobiles have usurped all the space in these colonies not occupied by houses, so much so that a pedestrian has to almost walk over the parked cars to reach anywhere.

Thanks to the space-devouring nature of the automobile, roads in Indian cities such as Jaipur, Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Lucknow, Kanpur, Coimbatore, Kochi are for most of the day clogged with barely moving traffic. This leads to such ironies that often, it is quicker to go from place to place in the city centre on a bike rather than in a car. One may recall that, back in the Sixties in Bangalore, it took just 25 minutes to bike from Malleswaram to Brigade Road. Today, by car, it takes 45 minutes, if you are lucky there is no traffic jam on the way.

Urban phenomenon

None of the Indian cities was designed to accommodate dense automobile traffic. In almost all of them, barring perhaps New Delhi, Chandigarh and Bhuvaneshwar, the road surface area is less than 5 per cent of the total city area.

This was tolerable 30 years ago when the addition of new cars to Indian city roads was around 50,000 per annum and of scooters/motorcycles around one lakh per annum. Today the Indian automobile industry churns out nearly six lakh four-wheelers and 4.2 million two-wheelers annually. The road space remains almost the same, but for some peripheral chopping off of pavement space which only brings the pedestrians out onto the road and further constricts the road space. Traffic gridlock is going to beecome more frequent in the days to come.

Parking problems

There is another painful dimension to the space problem with regard to the automobile - the need for parking. It has become almost impossible in the big cities to provide parking space in downtown business areas. Most roads are so narrow that using the kerbside for parking only creates bottlenecks for the flow of traffic. The problem is further exacerbated with the proclivity of Indian car drivers to double park.

Diverting the parking to side roads in residential areas only leads to strife when haphazardly parked cars block the entrances of houses. There is glib talk of promoting multi-storey car parks like in the US. What is forgotten is that building such facilities is expensive and the resultant parking fees to break even will be anywhere between Rs. 30 and Rs. 50 per hour. When the average car owner balks at paying even the Rs. 5 per hour now charged for kerbside parking, why will he use the much costlier multistorey car parks?

Offices in Indian cities are already feeling the pinch of the automobile explosion. Take the case of The Hindu office in Bangalore, which has compound space. In the early Seventies, only two cars and a few scooters had to be accomodated in the compound. There was space left over for a volleyball court for the off-duty entertainment of the staff.

Today, the car population has gone up to two dozen and the two- wheelers to over 50. Forget about a volleyball court, there is not enough space for the vehicles and everyday parking inside is a game of musical chairs. If this is the plight of an office with compound space, imagine the situation of offices housed in multi- storey complexes downtown.

In a recent essay, Mr. Lester Brown, former chief of the Washington D.C.-based Worldwatch Institute, describes graphically the space gobbling propensity of the automobile in industrialised societies.

Each U.S. car, for example, requires an average 0.07 hectare of paved land for roads and parking space. With its 214 million motor vehicles, the area devoted to roads and parking lots covers an estimated 16 million hectares (approximately 1.5 lakh sq. kilometres ) in the U.S. Just to get things into focus the total land area of India is about 33 lakh sq. km. of which flat land is about two-thirds.

More often than not, cropland is paved simply because the flat, well-drained soils that are well suited for farming are also ideal for building roads. Once paved, land is not easily reclaimed. As environmentalist Mr. Rupert Cutler once noted, ``Asphalt is the land's last crop.''

Car-centred industrial societies that are densely populated, such as Germany, the U.K. and Japan, have paved an average of 0.02 hectare per vehicle. And they have lost some of their most productive cropland in the process.

More acute in developing world

With automobile ownership reaching near saturation in the industrialised countries, the global automobile majors are turning their focus on the developing countries, where automobile fleets are still small. More and more of the 11 million cars added annually to the world's vehicle fleet of 520 million are found in the developing world. This means that the war between cars and crops is being waged over wheat fields and rice paddies in countries where hunger is common. The outcome of this conflict in China and India, two countries that together have 38 per cent of the world's population, will affect food security everywhere.

If China were one day to achieve the Japanese automobile ownership rate of one car for every two people, it would have a fleet of 640 million, compared with only 13 million today. While the prospect of such an enormous fleet may seem farfetched, we need only remind ourselves that China has already overtaken the U.S. in steel production, fertilizer use, and red meat production. It is a huge economy and since 1980 also the world's fastest growing economy. In 1994 Beijing announced that it planned to make the auto industry one of the growth sectors for the next few decades.

But growth at what cost? Assuming a requirement of 0.02 hectares of paved land per vehicle in China, as in Europe and Japan, a fleet of 640 million cars would require paving nearly 13 million hectares of land, most of which would likely be cropland. This figure is over one half of China's 23 million hectares of rice land. Even one car for every four people, half the Japanese ownership rate, will consume a substantial area of cropland.

While India is geographically only a third the size of China, it too has more than one billion people, and it now has eight million motor vehicles. Its fast-growing villages and cities are already encroaching on its cropland. Add to this the land paved for the automobile, and India, too, will be facing a heavy loss of cropland. A country projected to add 515 million more people by 2050 cannot afford to cover valuable cropland with asphalt for roads and parking lots.

The plain fact is that there is not enough land in China, India, and other densely populated countries such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, Egypt, and Mexico to support automobile-centred transportation systems.

Looming urban chaos

Governments that subsidise an automobile infrastructure with revenues collected from the entire population are, in effect, collecting money from the poor to support the whims of the wealthy. In subsidising the development of an auto-centred transport system, governments are also inevitably subsidising the paving of cropland that can lead to a food crisis in the future.

In the land-hungry developing world, the time has come to reassess the future of the automobile, to design transportation systems that provide mobility for entire populations, not just affluent minorities, and that do this without threatening food security.

The emphasis should shift to buses and trains for mass transport and the bicycle for individual transport. This is not a Luddite prescription. On the contrary, it is a futuristic solution and the only one that can prevent urban chaos and food shortages in countries such as India and China.

N. N. Sachitanand

in Bangalore

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Business
Previous : Basics of a car
Next     : VRS can be an opportunity