Transportation In The United States: An Open Letter
To The Chief Minister Of Maharashtra
By Karthik Rao Cavale
21 July, 2010
Countercurrents.org
From,
Karthik Rao Cavale
Highland Park
New Jersey, United States of America
To,
Shri Ashok Chavan,
Hon'ble Chief Minister of Maharashtra
Mantralaya, Mumbai
Date - 06/13/2010
RE: Transportation in the United States
Dear Shri Chavan,
I hear that you recently made a trip to the United States to study the transportation infrastructure here. I hope you had a good experience.
Well, it's a pity that we did not get to meet! I read about your trip in the papers and wanted to write to you beforehand, but you had completed your trip before I could finish writing the letter. Since I came from India to the United States to study transportation, I was going to offer you a guided tour of the transportation system of the United States. I hope you will accept my offer and make another trip, for I promise to show you what you will not see otherwise.
You'll be staying with me, of course, in my small garden apartment in suburban New Jersey - no, no, I insist! Why do you want to waste taxpayers' money on a hotel room? Now, me being a poor grad student and all, I can't really afford a car to drive you around, so we'll have to make do with public transport. But as chief minister of a state where the per capita income is 100 Rs a day, surely you don't mind that? I would imagine that you would be interested particularly in how the transportation system here works for the poor!
But once you get here, you'll find that the nearest commuter train station is a 30 minute walk away from my house. You'll also find that part of the pedestrian path winds through a large park and gets dark and unsafe at night. The alternative is to walk on the road where there is no footpath. If you don't mind cycling, I can lend you my cycle. But you'll find that bike lanes don't exist everywhere and that it's scary to cycle on even minor arterials when cars zoom past.
Since you're coming to the United States, I'm sure you'll want to buy a lot of Hershey's chocolate and clothes for all your friends and relatives back home. For shopping, we'll take a bus to the nearest regional mall. You'll find that buses ply with a one hour frequency in this part of the country and the trip take more than an hour. You'll also find that buses are used mainly by racial minorities - poor Hispanic and black women who don't have cars to drive to the shopping mall. Or perhaps we could rent a car, in which case you'll find that a trip which takes one hour and fifteen minutes by bus takes only fifteen minutes by car.
And we must to go to the Casinos of Atlantic City, of course. (Whom are we kidding? That's the whole point of coming to the United States!) But on the way, we'll stop by at Camden. Camden was once a prosperous industrial city, but it is now little more than a ghost city, and like many other American cities, it is mired with problems of poverty and crime. Upon seeing the deserted neighbourhoods, you might ask, why did Camden deteriorate? Well, the story goes like this. From the 1950's onwards, USA embarked on a massive project to connect its cities with "interstate" highways. But rather than making cities more prosperous, these new highways precipitated the flight of the white middle class into the sparsely populated suburbs. These new suburbs were accessible only by cars, because public transport was unviable at such low population densities. As a result, a car become a basic necessity in American life and no one walked or cycled on the streets any more. Trips became longer, highways became congested and the governments built more highways to meet the demand that they themselves had artificially created. At the same time, cities deprived of the middle class became more and more poverty ridden and dysfunctional. But the poor were still stuck in the cities, which were by now uniformly the worst places to live in. Unemployment levels were high and this led to more crime. Even today, the poor live in ghetto-like central city neighbourhoods with little access to jobs or shopping malls or any of the good stuff that sets the American lifestyle apart.
If you were to do what politicians typically do on such trips - fly in aeroplanes and drive around in cars - you will not see what I have just described. You will only see and marvel at the engineering sophistication involved in building loopy interchanges and sparkling highways, but you will not see the devastation they cause on the cities they are supposed to serve. You will see the shiny metros with their relatively empty coaches - with excellent safety systems, I might add - but you will not get any insight on why they go empty and need large operating subsidies. Mr. Chavan, USA is just beginning to realize that there are big flaws in the way it has planned its transportation infrastructure. These mistakes have resulted in huge petroleum imports that drain USA's exchequer, in a greenhouse gas footprint that threatens the survival of the human species, in an infrastructure demand that helps no one but the contractors who build the infrastructure, and in the all-round destruction of America's oldest cities. That is the "world-class" transportation infrastructure that you seek to emulate.
Now, one might argue that whatever the externalities of USA's transportation system are - in terms of climate change, national debt and the health of its cities - the system does serve the transportation needs of the portion of population that does own a car (which is a majority of the population). I cannot say that I wholeheartedly agree, but there is an element of truth to this suggestion. And if this system requires everyone to own a car, and if it requires massive investment in transportation infrastructure and petroleum imports, then the United States is rich enough to withstand these costs. But Mr. Chavan, please do consider that India is by no means remotely as rich as the United States. We of all nations do not have the luxury of picking the costliest solution to the problems at hand! For starters, more than 80% of our population cannot afford a vehicle of any type, not even two-wheelers. And imagine, if somehow all our households did buy personal vehicles, then how much more of road infrastructure we will need! At present, USA, with a population of 30.7 crore people, has a road length of 64 lakh km. India, with a population of 113 crore, has a road length of 33 lakh km, less than a half of which is motorable. With 25.4 crore vehicles, the United States has almost reached the point where everyone has a personal vehicle. For India to reach that stage of saturation, we will have to create road space for at least a 100 crore vehicles! If we are struggling to provide for a measly 10 crore vehicles now, how much will we have to build to accommodate so many vehicles? We will have to at least quadruple our road network. The investment required is so large that no country - not even the United States - can imagine being able to afford it. With so many families to house and so many mouths to feed, should this really be our priority?
So here's my message to you: by all means, do come to the United States once again. Go to the casinos of Atlantic City, take a tour of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and go hiking in the Appalachian Trail. But I beg you, please do not go back and try to emulate America's transportation system in India. For if you do, then a large portion of India will be left entirely stranded. Unlike in United States, where these groups of poor and largely black and hispanic people (like those of Camden) constitute only small pockets of poverty, in India, these victims of development will be everywhere - villages and cities alike - but uniformly deprived of access to basic amenities. Our old cities, many of them thousands of years old, will be reduced to slums - if the wealthy can drive out of the city on an elevated highway within a matter of minutes, then why will they bother to peserve it? And in these slum-cities the poor will reside. When they don't die of hunger, they will die of disease, and if they escape disease they will die in road accidents. But the rich will drive on, just like Salman Khan, without caring for the death and the degeneration they are leaving behind.
I assure you, Mr. Chavan, whatever guilt you may feel on that account, your making a trip to the United States for a mere holiday would be an act of kindness to India when compared to the consequences of emulating the transportation system of the United Stares. But if you must learn from your trip here, then learn from their mistakes, for these are mistakes we cannot afford.
* * *
Since I seem to be so keen to tell you what not to do, you might ask me what we should do to solve our transportation woes. Well then, let's pretend for a moment that you actually care and you have the courage and the vision to do what needs to be done.
Here's what I'll suggest: instead of studying the United States, we'll begin by studying Mumbai. I can fly down to India, and you can fix me up in a room at the Chief Minister's bungalow and together we will study our cities. (You and your security guard will have to wear a disguise like the Raja Vikramaditya and Emperor Akbar used to do in the past, so that no one recognizes you and you get to see how our cities really work).
On the first day, we will travel back and forth between Borivili to Bandra to see how the train system functions. During peak hour, we will experience the inhuman and unsafe conditions in which people travel. The next day we will travel one again from Borivili to Bandra, first by bus and then by car. We will notice how time consuming it is for buses to negotiate the traffic, especially to get to the side lane, stop at a bus stop and get back into the moving traffic. We will notice that even in the most slow-moving traffic, cars take much less time than buses. We will observe the Western Express Highway and notice that almost the entire highway is occupied by four-wheelers, and the gaps are filled with two-wheelers. I will then ask you two questions: 1) Is this an efficient way of using the Western Express Highway that your government spent many crores of rupees building? Courld we not make arrangements such that this critical piece of infrastructure is used more wisely so more people can be transported at a faster rate down this highway? 2) Is it fair that the poor and the middle class are crammed up in buses and trains, with the associated dangers of being thrown off the train or getting electrocuted, while the rich sit in the comfort of their cars and end up occupying almost all of the highway that was built for the good of all commuters in this stretch?
If you find these to be valid problems, then we can debate possible solutions for the problem. My recommendation will be that we dedicate two lanes exclusively for buses on the entire stretch. The city will procure special buses to run at a very high frequency on this lane, with the intention of diverting some of the crowd from the trains into the buses. This way, the majority of Mumbai's population will be able to reclaim ownership over the Express highway, which formerly served only the rich. You might then express apprehension that such a system cannot work, that there will be chaos on the roads. And then - having gotten to this point where we are considering specific solutions - we can make a trip to Curitiba, Brazil or Bogota, Columbia where such systems are working remarkably well. But we could just as well go to Ahmedabad, where a similar bus rapid transit system (BRTS) has become operational within just a few years and functions as a much cheaper and equally functional alternative to a Metro system. Again, you might argue that where roads are already jam-packed with cars, it is not feasible to reduce space for them. Granting that this is true, we can then study methods of drastically reducing motor vehicle use - like the system of congestion pricing that has been introduced in both London and Singapore.
We will then spend a day in Mulund (W), walking in the market area outside station and observing where and how people walk. We will observe that in the evenings, most people get out of the trains, often spend some time in the market area shopping, and then either walk, take a bus or an auto to their home. You will find that they disperse into a multitude of directions, into the numerous housing colonies surrounding the station. You may then ask me what can be done to decongest the area and make walking safer without making the train station less accessible. I will suggest that an area of about 5-6 blocks along the three main roads coming out of the train station be made entirely free of cars and two wheelers. Two lanes in the centre will be allocated for buses and auto-rickshaws and the remaining space will be for pedestrians and cyclists.
On another day, we will try and cycle on the streets of Thane. You will find this to be a hellish and extremely unsafe experience, with motorists behaving as though you have no right to be on the road. You might ask me what can be done to make cycling safer and more convenient, and I will suggest a network of exclusive cycling lanes. To see how such solutions work, we can visit European cities like Copenhagen where governments have created excellent car-free spaces that are a joy to be in. But we could also go to Paris, where they now have a system in which you can borrow a bike from any one part of the city and cycle to a different part of the city and leave it there. And you will find that such a system is already being provided in Thane by a company called FreMo, only there are no cycle paths that would make cycling safer and more convenient.
And thus, Mr. Chavan, there are so many things we can do to provide better access to all our citizens - to the poor, the aged, the disabled, the women and the children, not just to reckless men on cars and two-wheelers. If you have the political will to do what is necessary, there are a number of places in the world where working solutions to similar problems have been designed, in Europe, in East Asia, North Africa, Latin America and even in the United States, provided you look carefully enough. But first we must look closely at our own cities, find out what will work for us. I suspect that neither you nor the planners in your government have really looked closely at how our cities work. Your government built a sea link at a great cost, but the sea link will be used only by cars - the exact opposite of what we want. For pedestrians, your government constructed skywalks, again at huge cost. These skywalks serve only one route in an area, but we found in our survey of Mulund that pedestrians are everywhere. These are indications that your government has not really given much thought to what people really need, rather it is being consumed in a frenzied attempt to recreate the image of a world-class city. But Mr. Chavan, isn't it obvious that your government has failed to create even an image of a world-class city, let alone provide the real amenities that a world-class city provides? After all, can anyone driving through the Bandra-Worli sea-link disregard the sight of the completely neglected Worli Koliwada staring straight back at him?
In writing this letter, I don't mean to suggest that I have all the answers. But it is not my job to provide answers, rather my job is to facilitate the discovery of such answers. If all of us studied our own cities with a critical eye, then the answers will come to us automatically. We can then discuss a range of alternative solutions so that we all clearly understand the issues involved and the consequences of our actions. At the end of the day, only a detailed study of our cities followed by a truly deliberative process can ensure that the projects we spend money on result in a positive change to our lives.
But first we must disabuse ourselves of the notion that repeating the mistakes committed by the United States will somehow make our cities "world-class". I'm hoping - rather optimistically - that this letter serves at least that purpose.
Thank you for your time and patience.
Warm Regards,
karthik
(http://vishwakarman.wordpress.com/)
PS: Since we're going to be chums and all, can I ask you to bring along with you some masalas and pickles that my mom has prepared? Please do let me know by emailing me at [email protected].
Karthik Rao-Cavale did his B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in Mechanical Engineering, but soon found that making cars was not as much fun as getting rid of them. He now studies city and regional planning at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and focuses on planning history and transportation planning.
