Well, not really, but that is what his article bemoaning the growth of cars amounts to.
I stay in Thane, a good 5 km away from the railway station and I work in Andheri, a place 10km away from the nearest convenient railway station (Kanjurmarg). It takes me more than an hour to cover the 23 km by car. It would take me much much more by buses and trains. If I had to use public transport, do you think I’d stay there if I could afford a closer place? I’d move to a closer place, paying the insanely high prices for houses close to railway stations, driving those prices even higher. The poor who want to live in legal housing will have to move far away from the downtown areas and far from transport hubs to get a house within their budget.
Please note that this problem has nothing to do with the inefficiency or inadequacy of public transport. This is the inevitable with the hub-and-spoke system. Public transport can’t connect every place to evey other place with a single connection, so you need to have trunk routes and feeder routes connecting to the trunks. This means that most people who do not live on the trunk routes will have to make atleast one change. Very often, they’ll need two. Change means waiting and inconvenience, which people will avoid if they can, by buying houses close to the trunk. Besides, buses will have to be slow, because they will have to stop quite often. This again means that people will want to stay closer to downtown to avoid long travel times. (Unless they stop less often, but that will again increase pressure close to the hubs.)
Also, this problem will get worse as the city spreads out far and wide. Public transport was thinkable when Mumbai was essentially two straight lines, but now that the city has spread out to Navi Mumbai and Thane, designing an efficient and convenient public transport system which will replace private transport is almost impossible. (Or you could try to stop the expansion of the city by putting a chokehold on the land outside the city, as Dharam Singh and his cronies have done in Bangalore. That will again do wonders for the land price inside the city.)
If you really want low-cost housing for the poor, you need to build good, wide and fast roads so that people who can afford cars can stay far away from the city centre, leaving places close to the city centre free for people who need to use public transport. The other way is to ask the government to take on the responsibility, which I am sure will work as well as those things usually do.
The last line is brilliant
You are joking right? Poor people in India are going to drive cars soon. Until there is overall growth and India catches up with the West (something that will take more than 50 years by the most conservative estimates), less cars does not equal to no low-cost housing for poor.
Yes more cars and wider roads will mean that the new rich and new upper middle class can stay far away from the poor in spacious, cheaper housing while the poor remain stuck in the centre of the city. A suburb-innercity phenomenon seen in the US.
Moreover, public transport can be operated by private operators and has been done very well in many cities in India.
Personally, wherever I have lived in India, I have preferred public transport operated by the govt than private operators. Govt. buses are better maintained, sturdier and the drivers are more careful while driving.
Does my argument rest on the assumption that the poor in India will start affording cars any time soon?
Illogically, yes.
Ravi,
Let me explain to you what’s happening in Seattle right now. I am sure it is worst in places like LA and bay area. Inspite of 4-lane highways the I-5 and I-405 are just too congested(these are the roads that connect Seattle and Bellevue where most of the businesses are present to other parts) . Public transport system is not good in Seattle (except ofcourse in the city center)…All this is because you will find only one person riding on a big SUV or a truck… You can’t blame them….Public transport is non-existent and car-pooling is not a practical solution… …If this is the case in the US with so much space available, I really don’t know if this solution is alright for India.
1) Lakshmi, I am saying that just providing efficient public transport is not enough. As long as people have an option, they will use their cars. People won’t voluntarily switch to using buses if they have an option. And if they don’t switch, buses will run empty and people will start asking why on earth they are subsidising it.
2) So you will have to force people into buses, either by an outright ban on cars, or by making it very expensive to drive their cars – road pricing, petrol cess, high parking charges, etc.
3) But if you do succeed in forcing people to use public transport, it will still come at a cost. The cost is that there will be much more crowding at the city centre, because it is simply not possible for buses to serve a large sparsely populated area. Imagine that the entire population of King County is crammed into downtown Seattle. That’s how it will be.
So my point is, Dilip has a static view of the city. He assumes that people will stay where they are while he merrily messes with their transport arrangements. That is simply not true. A city that is served only by public transport will develop in a completely different way from a city that is served by cars. For example, in the US, you will find that there are some cities that developed before widespread ownership of cars was the norm – New York, LA, Chicago. There you will find that people are crammed into apartment blocks. The cities that developed afterwards (like Seattle) have people living in suburbs away from the city centre. This happened because they had cars and could commute long distances. If they hadn’t had that option, the same crowding would have happened in the new cities too. Perhaps you prefer the crowding to the traffic jams, but atleast recognise that there is a trade-off.
Ravikiran, here is a little something to find out.
The US deliberately encouraged car-ownership as against public transport not just for economic reasons but national security reasons. Figure out what the national security reason was.
It was a deliberate top down policy decision that led to the formation of such cities.
How many people are there in King County to overcrowd Seattle? Anyway this is not about the US, this is about India.
Comparing India, a densely populated country with the US, a less densely populated country for these reasons is just weird. The closest comparison of India can be with China or Thailand. Even land-hungry Europe is much more useful in understanding the needs of India. In parts of South India, there are highways where one cannot find a single open space on either side of the road. The urban sprawl is already here. But you want more.
You want to keep poor people out of the city?
According to Wikipedia:
Seattle City: 572,000
Seattle Metropolitan Area: 3.7 million
King County: 1.7 million
Let’s be generous and say that Tacoma and Everett have 0.5 million each also. That still leaves 2.2 million people living in Seattle suburbs (forget King County).
The only solution is to introduce a congestion tax on private vehicles as done in Singapore, thereby discouraging use of own cars, and deploy the funds to create a robust and reliable public transport system. Unfortunately, if past record in anything to go by, we will be selective in our emulation. We will collect the tax,but not use it to build a public transport system.
I support a congestion charge for vehicles entering congested areas. But just keep in mind that unlike Singapore, India is a big country. That will provide an incentive for businesses to move out of congested areas like Nariman point and into less congested areas like Navi Mumbai. This is not a bad thing of course, but if your intention is to encourage the use of public transport, there is only a slim chance of that happening. Plus it will encourage “urban sprawl” which people consider to be a bad thing for reasons I’ve never understood.
Seattle, San Fransisco etc are so not because of the availability of cars but because of strict zone regulations and in one case rent control. I am sure our ‘libertarians’ are happy with this as an example for Indian cities to follow.
Simple fact is that fewer cars is not equal to lack of access to the poor for cheap housing in India. It shows a lack of understanding of development and prosperity in India. If the argument was that less public transportation means lack of access to the poor in India to cheap housing I might have a agreed to some extent. Other factors like urban sprawl, infrastructure etc will increase the cost in outlying areas as well. But for the sake of simplicity I will overlook it.
Also when somebody advocates that poor be allowed to stay in the city centre, he/she should remember that along with the rich who move out to the suburbs will move their offices. The rich and the upper middle class don’t like spening too much time commuting by car. They would rather spend, that oh-so-cute phrase “quality time” with their families. The result is that in many US cities, the offices are moving out of the city centres to the suburbs further impoverishing the cities while the rich/upper middle class suburbs further prosper.
The simplest is a market solution to let everything go. Considering the poverty and increasing fuel prices the city centre will have the rich while the poor will be in the margins and use public transport. With rent control and subsidies the situation can be mitigated to some extent. Of course, administration of rent control and subsidies requires a mature polity. So my idea or coolhead’s idea is not going to work any time soon.
The easiest solution is to allow a lot of private bus operator licences or expand the govt system. It works very well in two South Indian states.
By “let everything go” I take it that you want the poor to live on the outskirts of the city. That reminds me of something that you Mallus used to be famous for.
Ravi,
I am still not able to figure out your trackback thingy.
Anyways, just wanted to ping you with this
The poor usually work in industries that should be logically outside the city. While the rich and the middle class have white collar jobs usually work in offices and hence can be in the city centre.
“Letting go” is what free-marketers want. I am for good government regulation that at the maximum will also forcibly make the rich live alongside the poor and make them send their children to the same schools so that each side can learn the realities of the other. Of course, what I mentioned earlier was the realistic answer.
Funnily, in Singapore, they insist on each housing block to be ethnically mixed.
Mallu? I am not ‘skb’. Kerala is probably the only place where all castes have been empowered. Say what? Want me to compare with some other states? Hmm!
Illogically yours,
yum yum
So you want everyone to remain stuck in the congested centre of the city.
In your fantasy world where industries are situated away from the city centre, how are you planning to tackle urban sprawl? It looks to me that when textile mills moved from Mumbai’s centre to the far-flung areas of Bhiwandi etc. the sprawl increased, by definition.
Yum Yum wrote:
The poor usually work in industries that should be logically outside the city. While the rich and the middle class have white collar jobs usually work in offices and hence can be in the city centre.
In other words, the maid who cleans my home, my gardner, the postal worker, the UPS/Fedex guy, the electric maintenance worker, dept store clerks, janitors at work, admin assistants, security, parking lot attendants, waiters and thousands of others who provide me services in the middle of the city, in your opinion, are either middle or upper middle class or don’t deserve to work in the city.
It only makes your ‘fewer cars equal to lack of access to poor people in India to cheap housing’ look even sillier. Anybody decent govt won’t let industries in the middle of the city.
I am not interested in a big debate about urban planning. Certainly not when cars are at the centre of such an exercise in planning.
The operative word is “usually” in a rapidly industrialising country rather then a service-heavy country with ‘UPS/FEDEX guys’ and ‘parking lots’ 😉 They still call them ‘car parks’ in India. Right? 🙂
I have no problem with poor living anywhere. I talked about rent-control and public transportation to mitigate market effects that will definitely push the poor to the peripheries. That is better than asphalting more green spaces and polluting the air with ever more cars.
Stick the topic. I am not debating urban planning here.
Coming to think of it, the concept of a ‘city” itself is outdated and is a vestige of the second-wave or industrial era. People no longer need to congregate in one place, be it for work, entertainment or health care.
In the company I work for ( incidentally, an enginering firm, not one of those new-economy types) , it dawned on us that we don’t pay people for their time, but for their output. We have done away with offices and encouraged employees to go virtual . They work from the comfort of their homes 2 or 3 days a week. No loss of productivity has been reported.
Similarly, in health care. Apollo Hospitals has started a few “family clinics” in different parts of Chennai, encouraging poeple to go to these decentralised spots for consultation and routine ailments, thus decongesting the parent hospital.
Whrn satellite TV, malls, movieplexes abound in a suburb like Navi Mumbai, people no longer need to venture out to the main city , seeking entertainment.
Cities are white dwarfs that have crossed the Chandrasekar Limit and are simply waiting to explode. Allow them to die a natural death by creating conditions conducive for decentralised, self-contained existence.
Coming to think of it, the concept of a ‘city” itself is outdated and is a vestige of the second-wave or industrial era. People no longer need to congregate in one place, be it for work, entertainment or health care.
In the company I work for ( incidentally, an enginering firm, not one of those new-economy types) , it dawned on us that we don’t pay people for their time, but for their output. We have done away with offices and encouraged employees to go virtual . They work from the comfort of their homes 2 or 3 days a week. No loss of productivity has been reported.
Similarly, in health care. Apollo Hospitals has started a few “family clinics” in different parts of Chennai, encouraging poeple to go to these decentralised spots for consultation and routine ailments, thus decongesting the parent hospital.
Whrn satellite TV, malls, movieplexes abound in a suburb like Navi Mumbai, people no longer need to venture out to the main city , seeking entertainment.
Cities are white dwarfs that have crossed the Chandrasekar Limit and are simply waiting to explode. Allow them to die a natural death by creating conditions conducive for decentralised, self-contained existence.
Yum yum, your promise has been noted. I will delete any further comments that you make on this topic. The average IQ of the discussion will go up as a result.
I see our friend yum yum is still sticking to the “i’m not skb” story. If you’re not him, then you’re his room-mate, dude, if the IP addresses of the comments are to be believed.
Continuing from coolhead’s point, we had this talk earlier this week by an ‘I-banking dude’ who talked about how their IT division has made it possible for anyone to work from anywhere in the Internet. They had to do this because after the WTC went down, they realised that they couldn’t really count on having an office.
Obviously this is not going to make everyone quit their offices overnight and start telecommuting, but it illustrates that the attractiveness of telecommuting is going up. Tipping point in the next five years, perhaps.
Let’s not go off topic. This is getting really interesting. Ravi, What are your answers for issues raised in Desipundit?
‘I am saying that just providing efficient public transport is not enough. As long as people have an option, they will use their cars. People won’t voluntarily switch to using buses if they have an option. And if they don’t switch, buses will run empty and people will start asking why on earth they are subsidising it.’
I don’t agree. If only there was a better transport system in King County, I would prefer taking a bus rather than spending 30 minutes everyday on I-405 or I-5 in my car with all associated stress of driving a car.
Well…..this idea was implemented in the States years ago, and commuting by car REALLY sucks in big cities. Even in medum sized Seattle (pop. just 1.5 million for the entire King County), in rush hour, it can take an hour to commute from Redmond to Seattle (8 miles). It actually takes LESS time by bus from Redmond-SEattle, because the bus travels in the carpool lane! It is a LOT worse in Chicago or NYC, or even SFO (just marginally bigger than Seattle), but if you want to see REALLY bad, you need to go to LA which does not have a real public transport system. I’ve been stuck in traffic snarls for 2 hours or more there.
Let’s for a moment assume that problems associated to Urban Sprawl don’t even exist. Maybe they are just hyped up problems.
I neither want inner city crowding nor do I want traffic jams. What is the solution then? I want to know if there are cities that are as spread out as Seattle and still have a good transport system. I suspect that a lack of good transport system in the United States is because of the strong car lobby that operates here.
Unfortunately, a spread-out city and efficient public transportation do not go hand-in-hand. I live in Maryland, close to Washington DC. Though the city has a reasonably efficient metrorail system, the suburbs are connected with not-so-efficient buses. Being a graduate student, I am forced to live far away from the university (nearby places are expensive) depending on the metrobus for commuting. And I know how bad it is. We have to travel large distances for things like grocery shopping and the metrobus just sucks in their frequency and cost. Most students buy a car as soon as they can to avoid all this. As I can clearly see, a spread out city cannot support public transport.
One very interesting thing in all this is that the rental costs near the metrorail system is really low. This is because of the high crime rate in areas adjacent to the metro. Maybe something like this can be done in Bombay to keep the rich people away from the areas close to the railway line? 😉
Good points Lakshmi.
The answer, atleast for Seattle is building both roads and transit. For years US has spent disproportionately higher on roads than on transit. Generally this has resulted in even more travel by car and more congestion and related problems. At the same time one cannot stretch this generalization to say that building roads is automatically bad and so let’s build only transit. Transit for all its efficiencies has a drawback in the sense that it can connect only a limited number of people and their activities (a necessity for travel). Building transit where it makes sense – for instance along known geographically constrained commute corridors such as those between Seattle and Redmond / Bellevue would be efficient but costly nevertheless. Adding lanes to I-405 would make some sense given the travel market it serves, i.e. connecting Seattle’s suburbs (Renton, Bellevue, Kirkland, Everett etc.)like a ring road. The downside would be more sprawl and no guarantee that the problem of congestion would be solved for ever.
A similar logic with appropriate considerations given to local conditions could be developed for almost urban area around the world. It would have the advantage of appeasing both sides of the debate while achieving some degree of sucess in its intended goal. Cities in Europe seem to have come closest to this ideal. Let me add a few more tidbits to this debate:
1. In most urban areas in the U.S, congestion is only going to get worse. For example in Seattle, spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a variety of projects (whether all roads or all transit or any combination thereof) over the next 30 years in Seattle is only going to keep congestion levels constant, never really eliminate it. How do I know this ? I have worked for the last 10 years as a transportation planner/engineer in the Seattle area and worked on a study by the local DOT designed to study this problem. The conclusions are more or less stated above.
2. Whichever way we go, trade offs of various kinds are inevitable. In Seattle the existence of the GMA (Growth Management Act – a law that limits new developments in urban areas) has resulted in higher property values, moderated sprawl and its effects, increased congestion on some roads and preserved some of the beautiful forests, lakes and mountains around the Seattle area. In other words – you can’t have wide open roads and picture postcard scenery all around you all the time.
3. In the future transportation network changes will always track behind social and economic changes, not become the cause of them. This is because transport improvements are going to become more expensive, hence harder to build and due to scare resources fewer in number. Large social/economic changes that RR theorizes about as a result of transport projects are very unlikely to happen. Note here that the past is not necessarily a reliable predictor for the future!!
Sorry for the long post…
– Murli
Murli,
“Higher property values” is another way of saying “Let’s keep the poor out”, which was my point in the first place. I did not understand your point #3. The theories that I came up with were predictions for India. The fact that future transport development may not cause social and economic changes in the US (something that I understand) has nothing to do with how they will affect India.
Lakshmi, you want a solution? I can only refer you to Buddha’s first noble truth.
Oh as for the issues raised by Desipundit, well, I am more concerned about the citizens than about the cities. The rich, middle-class and the poor have stayed in different places since time immemorial. It did not start with the introduction of cars. Even in a world with no discrimination, snobbery and crime, it will be property prices that will ensure that the rich and poor are able to afford houses in different localities.
Given this eternal fact, which world do you prefer? A world where the poor stay far away from the city centre, as we have in India or a world where the poor stay close to the city centre (and to their place of work and also able to use public transport) and the rich stay far off? If you are more concerned about the city than about the citizens, you will prefer the former. Being concerned about “white flight” somehow assumes that it is important for the city to have respectable middle-class (white) people at its centre. That is simply not true of course. What matters is the convenience of its citizens.
If the “white flight” did not occur because the (white) middle-class was forced to use public transport, the (black) poor would be forced out of the city because they couldn’t afford houses there. The moral of the story is, be very careful of the phrases Americans coin. They are past masters at making good things seem bad and vice versa.
Assuming that economics is the sole criterion in the choice of residence, , the individual grapples with three dimensions
1) the area or locality
2) the size of the apartment or house and
3) the distance, time , style of travel and cost to commute.
Many settle for 1 out of these three; a lucky few get 2 out of 3; some very privileged ones get all three. The points of equilibrium are different. For the poor, it means having to live close to their work place in congested places. 0 out of 3.
Most people in cities feel that they live sub-optimally and only the degree of deviation to the ideal varies.
In short, inequality is inevitable in a free market and one has to accept same, I guess – till we find a final solution, namely, doing away with the concept of cities.
What about the terrorism angle? Or riots? In case of public transport system (such as in London for example), it is easier to target public with acts of terrorism or riots. With cars it will not be that easy!
Ravi:
The higher property values, atleast in Seattle are probably a reaction to growth management policies not due to presence or absence of transportation. In general I am pointing out that transportation projects by themselves will have very little impact on how and where the poor live. Even if they do, there are enough other variables – economy, population preferences, migration etc. that will act as equilibrating influences and keep housing prices low enough for the poor to remain accessible to their work places.
You may be right about point # 3. Large scale projects that can precipitate huge demographic changes rarely happen these days atleast in the U.S. Any examples that you can think of in India ? We do know that roads in India for all their inefficiencies are a great equalizer – notice the number of bicyclists, rickshaws, pedestrians all mixed up with foreign cars and private vehicles. In that sense almost any transportation project is certain to bring benefits to all sections of society.
– Murli
This is getting to be a really interesting discussion.
Here’s my take……it really can’t be one at the cost of another. A good mass transit system , with a good park and ride facility can make car users use say a train to their workspot downtown, but drive up to the train station. Here, the suburban train has one major station in the suburb, and people can drive to it…..and take mass transit, so downtowns don’t crowd. Additionally, a bus service feeding to suburban stations/ or vanpools isn’t that hard to have…
This system can and does work in “spread out” cities. It will be impossible to build roads to satisfy all cars…as is being seen in the US.
Ashish’s terrorism angle…….well….you can’t live a life that’s dictated by terrorists…that just means they have succeeded. Given so many public transport systems in the world, and the relatively few terrorist incidents….Ashish’s angle is made largely redundant.
Good post RR.