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So in five months, the Mumbadevi-Zaveri Bazaar will become a seven-lane pedestrian utopia, unspolit by fumes, horns, or irritable drivers. Some vehicle owners must be seething: how dare they impede our status buggy? They will probably begin to calculate that more territory might be captured in the future by the government’s green consciousness. The government has been positively yellow so far in dealing with the abrasive effects of the middle-class’s growing affluence.

And vehicle owners, including me, have been mollycoddled the most. Take fuel subsidies, for instance. Oil prices are hovering around $100 per barrel, and some sane voices in the government urged the bosses, god knows who they are in the coalition flux, to lower the cost-protection bar for the public. But the government, or the ragtag infighters who profess to care for the poor, muzzled those voices.

And as a result, the middle-class ride on subsidies amounting to Rs10,000 crore. As for the poor, I suppose they will benefit from the largesse once they buy some gas guzzlers. The logic must be based on some exquisite intricacy of trickle-down economics, but for the poor to benefit, we need a gush-down of advantages rather than a trickle.

It seems so difficult for us, the car owners, to appreciate that only nine per cent of Mumbai’s population uses four- or two-wheelers. Since we drive in denial, the government finds it harder to understand the implications of the numbers. The self-willed ignorance accelerates the politicians’ reflex to pamper us: as far back as 1998, Rs10,000 crore was apportioned to be spent on a number of high-flying road projects. I say high-flying because 56 flyovers were loaded into the plan.

Curiously, almost 20 years before Mumbai stepped on the gas to please private motor owners, Danish towns such as Odense and Herning began creating experimental bicycle routes.

In the same period, the Netherlands launched an ambitious initiative to encourage ‘vehicular cycling’ and released a ‘bicycle masterplan’. Later, in mid-nineties, car ownership almost skidded over the precipice of fashion when John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr, the son of the former US President John F Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, began to cycle to office.

He had become the publisher of a magisterially produced magazine, George, but he had been the totem of the international swish-set much before his journalistic foray. So his green way attracted a lot of admiring traffic; alas, he died young.

But vehicular cycling, because of many committed environmentalists, is becoming popular across the world.

Lot of poor people cycle in Mumbai, and god help them if they halt the progress of a middle-class car owner for more than a nanosecond when lights change at an intersection. Now the carwallahs will be forced to walk in select zones. Come now, don’t fret. Remember your car won’t go everywhere. Surely, you are a pedestrian from your office car park to the elevator.

Email:raghu@dnaindia.net