ICT will redefine how Delhi travels in 2020

Along with companies promoting work from home, flexi-timings, telecommuting and remote access, ICT-enabled transportation system can solve Delhi's traffic problems

Picture this: it’s 2020 and you take your swanky car into the roads of Delhi. It’s barely been 1 km and you are stuck in a traffic jam. The serpentine of vehicles just seems unending. Now imagine this happening each and every day of your life. How frustrating will that be? Seems improbable? Think again and consider the following statistics – around 1,400 new vehicle registration every day to add to the fleet of 8.1 mn vehicles already on road, only 10% increase in road length over the last 10 years and most importantly, growth in Delhi’s vehiclular traffic by 4.1 mn vehicles over these 10 years (over 50% increase which is still nothing in comparision to the 2,700% increase between 1971 and 2011). With 77% of traffic comprising of light motor vehicles and another 17% by non-motorised vehicles such as cycle rickshaws and carts, the average speed even during non-peak hours is just 26 km per hour. This is still a rosy picture as compared to the average speed of 5 km per hour in peak hours on several routes. The scenario turns morbid when reports of fatalities in ambulances stuck in traffic surface. There is hardly any market or street in the city that does not look like a parking space. Delhiites love rains but only when they are not on the road stuck in the traffic jams that follow. Our beloved Delhi is undoubtedly poised to come to a grounding halt within the next few years and this was indeed a catastrophe which was waiting to happen. The point now is how we get ourselves out of this mess or are we destined to a slow and painful way of life? With ever increasing number of vehicles on Delhi’s roads, the situation is bound to become worse without adequate policy and technology interventions.
 
Fortunately, there have been some visionaries who envisaged this scenario a few years back and have been planning for the future. Pioneers in their fields, they calculated that even the progressive deployment of pan-NCR Delhi metro might not be an everlasting solution to the problems of the near future. The answer is actually both simple and elegant - a well-connected and networked society enabled by information and communication technology (ICT), acting as the foundation of an empowered society that would usher in an era of IT-enabled infrastructure sustenance practices and eco-friendly urbanisation. Some of the many initiatives that can prevent the imminent catastrophe are GPS-enabled multi-modal transportation (use of Google maps and other apps), common travel cards for all modes of transport, real time traffic monitoring (satellite tracking, city surveillance, etc), central control rooms, and traffic data analytics for current and future planning.
 
Today 13 billion devices are connected to the internet (an average of two devices per person). This figure will increase to 50 billion by 2020. This rapid increase in internet penetration will be pivotal in achieving the goals of Delhi’s 2021 masterplan. Videos, cloud technology, virtual infrastructure and wireless technology will emerge as the forerunners. Network connected devices will tell the occupancy status of parkings as well as the location of the nearest public vehicle fleet for hire. Online shopping malls and e-commerce will reduce the need for travel altogether, thus tackling the root cause of the problem. It is not so that all this will happen suddenly. The change process has already begun. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), desktop virtualisation, IT convergence and remote access are some of the means already in place at major Indian companies. A few such small initiatives have already been taken in cities like Bangalore and it is Delhi’s turn to take the bigger steps to the evolution of ICT enabled transportation. Delhi needs to adopt ‘SMART’ mobility where SMART is an acronym for sophisticated technology, market attractiveness for new mobility solutions, adoption of innovative products, raw materials and supply chain rationalisation and the enablement of new solutions by supporting infrastructure as well as policies.
 

This evolution will not just redefine transporation but will also change the business landscape. For instance, emergence of network-connected alternative drive vehicles and smart electric vehicle charging networks will create new business opportunities such as public charging station infrastructure and battery exchange business. Shared public vehicle fleets for rent are already common in Europe and can be expected to be a reality in Delhi as well by 2020. Information and communication technology system integrators will play the most important role in redefining this new value chain by shifting the focus from products to integrated solutions i.e. a single package of equipment, software as well as other related services. However, this change process will be ineffective if left alone to policy makers and infrastructure providers. Equal impetus has to be given to initiatives at the corporate level in terms of how we do business. If companies can promote work-life balance practices such as work from home, flexi timings, telecommuting and remote access to reduce the need to travel, we can be sure that there will be no looking back and ICT enabled transportation system will eventually be able to solve the problem of choked Delhi roads in the future.
 
Ankur Sharma, Farhan Gaziani & Ambrish Mittal are students at XLRI Jamshedpur and were participants at the Networked Society Cities Case Competition