VISIONARIES - TRANSPORT GROWTH
WEEK 4
PROGRAMME 3
I think in the twenty-first century transport is going to carry on very much in the way we’ve
seen in the last twenty years - lots of distance, lots of car journeys, for the wealthy people on
the planet, lots of high speed journeys by air, but fundamentally much more motorization,
much more pollution, much more road traffic accidents, and particularly for countries like
India and other countries in south-east Asia, the destruction of traditional city forms, because
cities will have to be changed in their structure to cope with cars.
India does bring to a sharp focus all these difficulties that most countries around the world are
facing, and in Calcutta it’s local people themselves who are actually getting very worried
about the growth in traffic, the growth in pollution, and I’m working with them to try and find
a way forward to sort out transport so it actually does deliver what they want, which is an
attractive, pleasant city in which they can bring up their children. So the main problem in
Calcutta is that there is the shift with lots of money from the United States and Japan
particularly to create a sophisticated, western-type model, and superimpose this on Calcutta,
which is a very traditional kind of Indian city.
This is damaging to the interests of poor people because not many people in Calcutta have
access to cars, and it’s actually, paradoxically, damaging to the children of wealthy people
because the level of respiratory disease and sickness in Calcutta related to pollution, related to
cars, is very high indeed. So what we’ve done in this very exciting partnership model is
actually produce a transport plan for Calcutta, which is all about really emphasising the
importance of rickshaws, trying to develop, with rickshaw pullers, an approach to using that
particular kind of transport intensively because it does a good job in Calcutta; how to develop
the tram system; how to make the buses work well with respect to the trams; how to improve
conditions for walking. We’ve put all this together in a kind of a traditional transport plan that
Calcutta could implement.
Looking around the world in terms of who does things well inevitably brings the discussion to
countries like Germany, Denmark and Switzerland, so we do have models, and models that
are kind of big city models, like Berlin, as well as models that are rural - Switzerland’s
transport system is very much geared up to dealing with remote rural areas. So there are very
good things going on.
The problems in Eastern Europe are very interesting. In Bucharest, for example, in Romania,
we have a city that for many, many years, certainly up to 1990, was a very pleasant, relatively
car-free, relatively high dependence on buses and its underground system, and this is all now
being swept away because with the end of centrally-planned economies, the end of
communist rule, the first reaction of most people is to rush out and try and get a car, and
Bucharest is now having to cope with three, fourfold growth in car ownership and car use in
less than ten years. I talked to people in Calcutta and Delhi and Bucharest and they see the car
as an extremely desirable expression of new economic freedom, new wealth, new status, and
it’s very hard indeed to put an alternative vision to that and to say, but what about the
thousand dead pedestrians in Calcutta every year? What about the problems of motor vehicle
exhaust emissions? Even with modern, technologically-sophisticated vehicles, there are still
emissions, the problem in terms of respiratory disease.
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So my vision is a rather gloomy one, that things in the next thirty years will get a lot, lot, lot
worse. Hundreds of thousands of children will be killed in every large city in south-east Asia,
in Africa, everywhere where there’s rapid motorization, even in Romania and Bulgaria and
Poland and so on, eastern European countries. We’ll destroy our cities, we’ll have more
pollution, more disease and more road traffic accidents, and then we will realise that we’ve
done something terribly wrong, and then we’ll spend a lot more money and we’ll put it right,
and I think it’s a source of huge regret that like in the twenties and thirties and forties in
Europe, we put up with pollution levels that we knew were killing people, and it was only
when the pollution levels killed lots of people in a small space of time, as in London in the
early 1950s, that we finally tackled air pollution, and we’ve got to go through that pain barrier
again.
(ENDS)
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