Barun Roy: After Nano, what?

ASIA FILE

India will choke unless it modernises its city transport systems, and you can't blame the Nano for this.

Tata's Nano has set the dovecotes aflutter and reactions are flying in all directions. Some people have hailed it, rightly, as the advent of mobility in India's frozen countryside. Others, wrongly, have denounced it as a bad idea, fearing that these tiny beetles will overwhelm our cities and choke their already badly clogged arteries.

The main point about the Nano lies elsewhere. Nano is not the problem, our unpreparedness is. If we feel there are too many cars already on our streets, it's because we have too few streets in the first place. If transportation is slow, it's because we've done very little to speed it up.

I came back to Kolkata ten years ago after 25 years of living abroad, only to find it's still the same constricted city I had always known it to be. Some flyovers have been built but few new roads. New buses are being merrily introduced even as road spaces keep shrinking. Hand-pulled rickshaws still ply, along with bicycles, cycle vans, and even pushcarts. Unsynchronised, manually operated lights are still the only way traffic is managed at intersections.

Roads are in perpetual chaos: dug up, repaired, dug up, or dug up and left half- or quarter-repaired. Carriageways are always half-blocked by parked vehicles, vendors and crowd spills. Trams still lumber along, though riders are few. Indiscipline is considered a mark of good driving. Lanes have no meaning. In such a city, Nanos are sure to create a nightmare, but that's no fault of the Tatas.

Regulations and restrictions can win only half the battle, if strictly enforced. Hong Kong is an excellent example of how sheer discipline keeps even an acutely space-starved city moving. But we'll never win the battle fully unless we renovate and restructure our cities, build a seamless network of intra- and inter-city roads, and introduce well-designed parallel modes of public transportation that will complement each other. The Nano has brought into sharp focus the need for a thorough re-planning of our cities and traffic systems because we can't stop cars from being made and bought, thereby killing an industry, or play King Canute and order a cap on urban growth.

Most Asian cities are going through fundamental changes to overcome the mounting pressures of cars and people. Beijing may be an extreme example where almost entire sections have been pulled down and rebuilt to make roads wider, straighter and unhindered, but major efforts can be seen almost everywhere to loosen up cities.

Having built a spectacular network of bridges, elevated city expressways, subways and a magnetic levitation commuter railway, Shanghai is now building a series of satellite communities, including a new town scooped from the sea, to mop up the overspill from its city centre. The Skytrain has revolutionised Bangkok, and the first of five proposed bus rapid transit routes will soon join its expanding subway network. Seoul is continuously expanding its subways and bus lanes, and 20 new highway routes are to cut through city and metropolitan areas by 2020.

In the next 12 years, Ho Chi Minh City will spend $26 billion to improve its transport systems, involving urban railways, ring roads, and radial arteries connecting the inner city with the suburbs and national expressways. An underground railway network is slated for Jakarta to complement its monorail and bus rapid transit corridors. Even a small place like Hong Kong, with one of the highest vehicle densities in the world, has 11 major road tunnels, 1,178 flyovers and bridges, 672 footbridges, and 417 underpasses to keep its people and goods on the move. There are nine city highways, and connections are seamless. I remember taking a bus once from Causeway Bay all the way to the New Territories without having to stop at a traffic light.

The message from Asia's urban transformation is loud and clear. Cosmetic surgery won't work. Widening roads here and there or building individual flyovers won't help. We need radical change.

First, a system of 'city highways' must be put in place to link centre city with the suburbs and beyond, with exits to major roads along the way. Ring roads have to be built at various distances with similar accesses. Getaway roads should be intersection-free.

Second, new, well-planned satellite townships, with getaway transportation links, should be built to decongest mother cities.

Third, public transport must be assigned the biggest share of city traffic. In Hong Kong it's 90 per cent, which explains why the city hasn't crumbled under its own weight.

And fourth, there must be a multiple choice of public transport. Buses, of course, but underground and elevated railways as well, forming a well-meshed network. Without networked public transport, it's impossible to untangle the traffic gridlocks sqeezing Indian cities.

That's the lesson. Are we going to learn?