Transport and Climate Change – Within Easy Reach?

Delhi’s new budget allocated 3,069 crore rupees to transport, 31% of the total and the single largest chunk awarded.  Metro construction will account for most of the budget, followed by a raft of road development measures, 23 rail over bridges, 17 road under bridges, 8 flyovers, a new Ring Road bypass and the use of nallahs as new roads and parking lots.  Finally, a fund has been provided for 2,500 new buses for the city to augment the fleet.

Now, given that transport contributes 26% to climate change globally and is the fastest growing source I think it’s important to give this a climate change test.

The first thing to wonder is how all the additional road space is going to help.  The number of vehicles in Delhi has now grown to over 6 million and the expenditure might help to relieve pinch points in the system, for a while at least.  But it doesn’t take much effort to realize that the more road you build the ‘cheaper’ and more convenient it becomes to use your car or motorcycle and the more people who, given a choice, will therefore use it. Congestion and pollution return, only an order of magnitude greater this time round.

In climate change terms this strategy contradicts with Delhi’s effort to augment the bus fleet with another 2,500 high quality vehicles.  The main reason is that public transport is nearly always less convenient than using a car, motorcycle, or even a bicycle over short to medium distances.  You have to walk to the bus stop, wait for an uncertain period, catch at least one bus, but maybe more, walk at the other end and so on.   Making private vehicle use even easier isn’t going to help get us on the bus or Metro.

Now you can tackle that in a number of ways.  You can improve the quality of public transport (which the budget promises) and lower the price to make it more customer friendly, but that often involves buying more expensive kit like A/Cs, etc, feeder services that will have fewer passengers than trunk route buses, and a more frequent service with fewer people riding in each bus.

In London ‘better quality’ means buses consume energy per passenger kilometre at nearly half the rate of an average car.  In Taipei, taking account of door to door emissions, the Metro actually consumes more energy than a car in terms of average per passenger km throughout the day.  The economist Dasgupta showed that if people have the choice to use private or public transport, even if you made public transport free, only 6% more would switch from private modes.

More effective than just increasing the supply and quality of public transport are complementary measures to deter car use like making parking and driving more expensive, fuel taxes, or limiting parking supply.  In places like London, Hong Kong, Singapore, and New York people use public transport because it would be foolish for them not to, and often they have no choice.

Even then it is important to be realistic as the city with some of the highest charges for private car use in the world, London shows.  Public transit occupancy levels dip outside peak times, leading to higher energy consumption on average, and a high drain on the public purse. That’s may not be a reason to cut services, but it could be an opportunity to be inventive. The provision of cycle rickshaws or safer cycle feeder routes could be more cost effective, particularly in terms of climate change. In Delhi it is likely that there is significant un-met demand for public transport and improved services are therefore likely to be less energy consuming than in Western cities, although many may be switching from less energy intensive cycles and feet to board it.

There is the need for a central role to be accorded to walking and cycling investments combined with land use planning controls that restrict urban sprawl, limit private vehicle parking space, and ensure that most of your daily requirements can be met within close proximity to your home.  Removing the need to travel in the first place must be the most cost-effective means of tackling climate change.

A focus on land use planning to locate everyday needs within easy reach would bring bicycles and legs into the reckoning because, over short to medium distances, they are faster than public transport.  They are also non-polluting.  There’s great potential in Delhi.  Despite being ignored in the budget, walking and cycling account for over half of all trips in the capital.  Whilst many of upper middle classes commute long distances, most Delhi citizens still live, work and shop in their local neighborhood.  The secret to tackling climate change involves providing high quality local urban services (parks, shops, schools, playspace, etc) that match people’s rising aspirations.

Presently people don’t ride, or use cycle taxis because motorized vehicles make them less safe. They also need an ‘image makeover’. And planners continue to ignore rider comforts like tree cover and vendor zones in hot countries, or reducing air pollution all over.  Cheap interventions like prioritising access for cycles and pedestrians across high speed vehicle canyons should be a priority. These interventions save lives, make cycling and walking practical, and come in cheap – kilometre for kilometre a cycle track in London would cost less than 1/400th the amount of the Jubilee Line extension.

This should not be construed as an argument AGAINST public transport, particularly buses. The more of us that use them the better, there will always be a need for those who cannot cycle or walk. We all want to explore our city or reach services outside our locality now and again. It IS an argument though for Delhi to re-discover leg-power, put greater emphasis on deterring motorized vehicle use, and controlling urban sprawl. If the world is to face its greatest challenge, that of averting catastrophic climate change, we have no choice.

“The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well. “

-Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity, 1974