The selfish car

Everyone had a story of 26/7. Now everyone has a new story, and it’s about 3/7 and 4/7. We may soon have stories for every day of the month.

Mine is about driving through Parel. And driving in Parel is just what you should not be doing if it’s a bad monsoon day. So a 20-minute journey took me two hours. When I moved out of this rush, I was met by the rush of water as I ploughed through “river-roads”. The next evening I was in a television studio discussing the subject of the city coming to a halt and like everyone else, I too was aiming darts at Johnny Joseph and his boys. Unfortunately, real villains are far more complex. So it is with Mumbai’s traffic woes.

Planners all over the world realised years ago that it’s private cars which hamper the smooth movement of traffic: After all, each car will carry only one passenger who needs to make the journey (the chauffer doesn’t) and it occupies precious road space, which is what makes cars the ultimate expression of selfishness.

Mumbai is a particularly strong example of this “selfishness”. Recent studies have shown that only 13 per cent of the city’s travelling public uses private transport or “semi”-private transport (taxis and auto rickshaws), while the rest travel by train or bus. Common sense tells you, therefore, that a major part of government resources should be spent on public transport. Ideally of every Rs 100 spent on this sector, Rs 70 should go into improving and expanding train and bus services and Rs 30 should go into roads (buses need roads too). In reality, of course, it’s the other way round.

Not only does most of the debate centre on the inadequacy of infrastructure, but a large portion of budgetary allocation also goes into things like flyovers, the Bandra-Worli  Sea Link, new link roads and so on. That’s because the decision-makers travel by car, and those who engage in public debate on the subject (like this columnist or this newspaper’s editors or TV channel anchors) only use private transport, which is why as much as Rs 12,000 crore is now being spent for this vocal minority.

An NGO, the Mumbai Environmental Social Network, has recently brought out a study on better traffic management for the city. Some of its recommendations are, at least at first sight, draconian. Like increasing manifold the one-time tax on cars, increasing parking charges by 600 per cent and trebling towing charges on illegally parked cars to Rs 1000. There’s logic in the suggestions: MESN points out that the one-time tax on cars in Maharashtra works out to 4 per cent of the cost of the car as opposed to 50 per cent in Shanghai (the city we want to emulate) and 150 per cent in Singapore (another city held up as a model). The recommendation to increase parking charges to Rs 30 per hour makes sense when you think of how scarce parking space is and how ridiculously low Rs 5 per hour is in this scenario.

MESN has recommended other “punitive” measures while advocating the “positive” idea of people sharing cars in an organised way. As it happens this is hardly a new idea, and people who can, have been sharing cars for years.

There have been ideas floated by other NGOs from time to time. Like only allowing odd number plates and even number plates on alternate dates, levying an entry tax on the London model and so on. None of them have been put into practice and none of them are likely to be: the reasons have partly to do with the difficulty of enforcement but mostly because they are not pragmatic.

Take London as an example. The parking charges there are positively prohibitive. As if that weren’t enough of a deterrence, a massive daily entry tax was introduced a couple of years ago. But London could do that because it already had a first-class public transportation system. Every other major city in the world which comes down heavily on private transport first puts an efficient and comfortable public system in place. Each city also puts a cap on the number of taxis, something we are reluctant to do, yet they are the biggest free-loaders on usable road space.

Agreed it’s a chicken and egg situation. But you can’t suddenly clamp down on private transport and overload an already creaking public transportation system. Change the funding pattern in favour of the latter as a priority; improve it so that it becomes a world-class service. Then people will willingly give up their cars without prodding or coercion. That’s what democracy is about, isn’t it?