Be the change: Make slow resurgence of cycling in our cities possible

Nikita Lalwani is an instrumentation engineer working with a multi-national corporate firm called Linde Engineering in Vadodara and she has been cycling to work everyday for last one and half years. Nikita also promotes the idea of cycling at work and she has convinced many of her colleagues to take up cycling seriously. She also runs a website - cyclingcities.infor promoting a cycling culture in our cities. Everyday (or occasional) cycling to work has health benefits for individuals and environmental benefits to the society at large. It is high time that employers, firms and individuals come forward and support employees who are coming to work on cycles by proving secured parking spaces, shower rooms and financial support if need be. Should it not make ‘business sense’ to support cycling, which consumes less parking space compared to cars? Parking is becoming a big real estate problem and if an employee does not want to consume as much parking then it is beneficial to the firm! 

Amidst overwhelming automobile culture and increasing traffic on roads, there has been a slow resurgence of a cycling sub-culture in our cities, at least amongst the privileged class. Ahmedabad has active cycling clubs like Cyclone and Ahmedabad Bicycling Club. There are businesses like Decathlon, Revolutions, Cycle Shop, Cycle Crew and MyByke who support cycling related activities. Emergence of these clubs and businesses indicate that there is a growing interest in cycling. If cycling is further backed up by adequate infrastructure by the government and by private sector employers then this interest will only multiply. Of course, any investment in cycling infrastructure will also benefit lakhs of poor cyclists who commute everyday on cycles and it will also encourage children to take up cycling to go to school or for fun. Apart from the government and private firms, individuals have to play an important role to promote environment-friendly choices like cycling. 

Cycling to work or to other destinations is an individual’s initiative to combat climate change, air pollution and traffic congestion. Are we happy with just our children making drawings like ‘save trees’ in their schools or should our concerns for environmental degradation make us take the onus too? As a society with increasing incomes, should we form habits around relentless consumption or should we make more environmental friendly choices in our own lives? These are difficult questions with straight answers. Do as much as you can to make more environment-friendly choices and encourage others to do so. If you are an employer then encourage your employees to take up cycling and if you are an employee then seek support from your employer for promotion of cycling. 

Probably an entire generation of kids will never know how to wander around the city on cycles. Many parents put a blanket ban on cycling for their children, which may be unnecessary. It should be perfectly alright for children to cycle on roads with less or limited traffic. If such an environment is not available then it should be created even if it is temporary. An interesting cycling event is being planned on the 5 km stretch on the riverfront road on Sunday, July 26, from 6 am onwards. You are welcome to join with your children. The only condition is to bring cycles and possibly helmets. Let’s create a safe cycling environment to promote a cycling culture in our cities because cycling-friendly cities are people-friendly, healthy and beautiful cities.

 (20th July, 2015: DNA Ahmedabad edition, Cities Supplement, Page 5)

Stop blaming pedestrians for getting killed & instead sensitise motorists!

In the last week, I read two contradictory news items from Delhi and Ahmedabad. The Delhi Traffic Police took out a drive for unruly motorists to respect pedestrians by giving them enough space on zebra crossing. Motorists who stopped before zebra crossings were given chocolates and key chains and the ones who did not were fined. The reason for this drive was the data of road fatalities – almost 46% of the people who died in road crashes in Delhi were pedestrians. Pedestrians do not have proper footpaths to walk on or safe crossings to go across the roads. It is commendable that the Delhi traffic police took the road fatalities data seriously and ran a campaign of supporting pedestrian rights. 

The other news items came from our own Ahmedabad (DNA, 29/06/15) where pedestrians were termed as ‘rash pedestrians’ by the Traffic Police and blamed for their own death or injuries in road crashes. The pedestrians were asked to use zebra crossings and footpaths to be safe. Great! It would have been utmost helpful, if the Traffic Police took some efforts of showing the said zebra crossings and footpaths by walking for about 200 meters on any city road! Where are the footpaths and zebra crossings in Ahmedabad? Footpaths are mostly covered by parked vehicles, roadside businesses and other things. There is no space left on the zebra crossings for the pedestrians to cross. The zebra crossings start and end in blank walls, planters and hoardings. With such sorry state of pedestrian infrastructure in the city, they are still blamed as ‘causes’ of accidents. 

How can the pedestrians alone be the ‘causes’ of these accidents? When there is a collision can you only blame one side? I can only picture these ‘rash’ pedestrians as being zombies who are crashing themselves into the fast-moving vehicles and committing suicide. Calling pedestrians as the sole reason for accidents amounts to blaming the victims. Pedestrians are victims and not perpetrators of traffic crimes because they are at higher risks and are more vulnerable during road crashes. Victim blaming has its own logical fallacies and besides, it is convenient to blame someone – it distracts the attention from the real problems. If you blame the victims like the pedestrians then no one will ask questions about systemic problems like why there is no safe infrastructure for pedestrians in the city? OR why the Traffic Police is only concerned about protecting the vehicular traffic and why do they ignore the pedestrian or the non-motorised traffic? 

Traffic Police in Ahmedabad and in other cities are doing commendable job of managing the unmanageable – the never-ending traffic. They have scarce resources, inadequate staff, limited equipments and a thankless job. But an important part of their job is to reduce road fatalities and injuries. Blaming the victims does not help their job at all. Rather they should proactively work with different road users to make them safe on our hostile roads. 

About one-third of the total intra-city journeys in our cities are by walking. We all have to walk sometime or the other. Unsafe pedestrian environment affects everyone in the family. When pedestrians are using the roads, they are scavenging for safe spaces to walk on. They operate with a different logic compared to the motorised traffic. Beyond the usual contest over road space, it is essential that both the pedestrians and the motorists understand each other’s way of dealing with the road space and have mutual respect. Cities, which are built on mutual respect and shared spaces, are the most beautiful cities in the world. 

 (6th July, 2015: DNA Ahmedabad edition, Cities Supplement, Page 5)

You are not stuck in traffic, you are ‘the traffic’ that you resent so much!

A bus full of people reduces about 50-80 vehicles from roads. A train coach will reduce about 100 vehicles if it reaches where the need is. 

"A developed country is not where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation."

You are not stuck in traffic, you ARE the traffic!’ – Originally a slogan from Copenhagen to promote sustainable means of transport has become a timely reminder for many city planners and administrators in the 21st Century. It is quite self-sympathising and self-deluding to believe that ‘I am stuck in traffic’ – as if there is a larger conspiracy to do so. Smart motorists realise that they are also contributor to the problem of traffic and they cannot get away by putting the blame on others for driving just like them. Recently I have been guilty of adding one more car in the city by buying one. The more I drive the car, the more I realise how I am contributing to the problem.

When you are a car driver, you would like wider roads and less traffic coming your way. Wider roads, free parking and smoother functioning of traffic coupled with lack of efficient public transport compel a lot of people to take up driving. Yet we have a very low car ownership in the country compared to many industrialised countries. For example, the US have about 750 cars per thousand people and we have not even reached about 100 motor vehicles per thousand people. In short, motor vehicles will be growing at unprecedented rates and we will have to learn to deal with this problem like other countries.

Cities around the world are realising that unlimited supply of wider roads and flyovers is not possible. These conventional solutions of keep building ‘roads over roads’ are not economically or environmentally sustainable. By building a maze of flyovers and by allowing relentless traffic, Delhi has attracted the worst air pollution, unsafe roads and never-ending traffic. Besides, who likes to live in a city, which has a jumble of flyovers on every junction but hardly any sight of greens! Even car drivers are not happy with these solutions because they neither get wide roads nor smoothly operated traffic. As new owners add more and more vehicles, the once-upon-a-time nice roads to drive on get congested.

Many cities have realised that they need to make ‘life-style changes’ to solve the problem of their clogged arteries and some by-passes here and they will not help in the long run. As Petro Gustavo - the mayor of Bogota famously said, “A developed country is not where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.” Promoting public transport and making it so efficient and affordable that a majority uses it is a challenge worth taking up.

A bus full of people reduces about 50-80 vehicles from the roads. A metro train coach will reduce about 100 vehicles provided it reaches where the need is. Many vehicle drivers will not mind walking short distances or taking public transport provided there are better facilities. Cities in Gujarat have surely made a good beginning in these directions compared to many other Indian cities but they will need to do much more. Over the last few years, the awareness amongst the citizens about the benefits of public transport is growing. This needs to be now backed up with the adequate investments, long-term plans and efficient implementation. Good governance gives us possibilities of being a solution to the problem and not only the contributors. Hope, we get our due!

(15th June, 2015: DNA Ahmedabad edition, Cities Supplement, Page 5)

If cities are engines of economic growth, what are the rest of train and coaches?

We need to move beyond romanticising either cities or villages & develop more nuanced understanding about their economic and social roles. In the last two decades, everybody from senior bureaucrats to World Bank officials and academic scholars keep reminding us that cities are the engines of economic growth. They complain that cities have not been given enough attention since independence and we need proper policy and increasing financial support for our cities. To some extent, the slogan ‘cities are engines of economic growth’ is posited against ‘India lives in her villages’. This contributes to a misplaced contest between cities and villages and vice versa.  This is a rather old debate in India. Some political ideologies have demonised cities as sites of criminal activities, greed and pollution. Besides, romanticising village life, which is believed to be closer to our traditions and nature. Both demonising cities or hailing their growth potential presents a one-sided picture. We need to move beyond romanticising either cities or villages and develop more nuanced understanding about economic and social roles of different settlements.  Cities are not islands. Each city becomes a city because of its hinterland, which is rural and agrarian in nature. There is a symbiotic relationship between cities and villages of economic, social and cultural exchanges. It is very difficult to draw a physical boundary around economic production or cultural imports. In fact, cities are quite diverse themselves and so are villages. To say that cities are the engines of economic growth is a misinformed analogy. Would engines have any meaning if they were running without the rest of the train? Would the rest of the train move if there were no engines? We need both the engines and the other bogeys of the train. And one should not claim that I am more important than the other.  In the urbanisation story of India, thousands of small and medium towns play an equally important role as the big metropolis. As per the 2011 census, we have about 50 cities with one million plus population and about 7,900 towns in the range of five thousand to one million populations with great diversity in their geography and economy. Lot of urban growth is taking place in these small and medium towns. According to the latest National Sample Survey, the small and medium towns across the country have witnessed more growth in jobs. Unfortunately, these towns are hardly supported by efficient municipal administration with adequate financial health. In Gujarat, we have about 150 municipalities, which do not receive as much financial support as the big municipal corporations.  Before embarking on the urban policies and programs, we need the right kind of imagination and conception about our cities. An urban discourse or urban policies should not necessarily hamper the focus on rural development and vice versa. Cities are not only engines or industrial production houses or labour markets. As the great urbanist Jane Jacobs would put it - “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” We need cities created by everybody and for everybody. Imagining cities as ‘engines’ is so limiting and boring. (8th June, 2015: DNA Ahmedabad edition, Cities Supplement, Page 5)

big cars, bigger egos and culture of rule-breaking kills people on the roads!

We are curiously watching the case of Salman Khan’s drunken driving and roadside killing. As of now, Salman Khan, balancing between public sympathy and hatred, is delaying the process of justice with a hope that he might evade it completely. As a reputed judge and author Tom Bingham said, the rule of law unfortunately is ‘hooray for my side’ for most of the people. This partisanship is often used to put pressure on the judiciary. Besides the larger issue of the prevalence of the rule of law, Salman Khan is surely a bad role model for the young motor vehicle drivers. 

Salman Khan is not the only bad role model in young people’s life. Youngsters learn most of their behaviour traits from their parents. How about parents (on motorbikes and cars) dropping kids to school by driving on the wrong side of the road? Lot of people believe that we should teach the kids traffic discipline from their childhood - catch them young! Kids learn more looking at the conduct of their parents then what they learn in the children's traffic parks. How do we expect the kids to follow traffic rules when there is a prevailing culture of casual rule breaking for the sake of little convenience? Unfortunately, this culture of casual rule breaking is considered social smartness in most cases and is further encouraged.

  

The wrongful behaviour on part of the motor vehicle drivers also emerge from their imagination of seeing themselves as 'victims' - 'what do I do when there is no provision for me!' or ‘give me more space, I am more important than others!’ When someone buys an expensive, big vehicle the feeling of victimhood doubles up - as if buying an expensive vehicle is a license to ask for more road space, free parking space and honking unnecessarily. More powerful people with their more powerful vehicles have a great sense of entitlement. When this self-assumed entitlement for unlimited road space is denied, they see themselves as victim of relentless traffic and not as equal participants in adding to the chaos. The combination of the culture of casual rule breaking and notion of ‘victimhood’ results in road rage and wrongful traffic behaviour. 

  

The statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau shows us that the bigger vehicles are responsible for larger number of road fatalities. Trucks or SUVs going at a high speed will kill more people than an auto rickshaw. With bigger vehicle comes bigger responsibility of saving other people’s life. 1.25 lakh Indians die in road traffic related crashes every year. If we are serious about reducing the road fatalities then we will not only have to make the physical infrastructure of our streets safer but also target some of these social issues - bad role models, sense of entitlement/victimhood amongst the privileged drivers and the culture of casual rule breaking. 

(11th May, 2015: DNA Ahmedabad edition, Cities Supplement, Page 5)