{"id":357,"date":"2005-07-06T18:41:44","date_gmt":"2005-07-06T13:11:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/2005\/07\/06\/dilip-dsouza-opposes-low-cost-housing-for-poor\/"},"modified":"2005-07-06T22:35:50","modified_gmt":"2005-07-06T17:05:50","slug":"dilip-dsouza-opposes-low-cost-housing-for-poor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/classic\/200507\/dilip-dsouza-opposes-low-cost-housing-for-poor\/","title":{"rendered":"Dilip D’Souza opposes low-cost housing for poor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, not really, but that is what his article<\/a> bemoaning the growth of cars amounts to.
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\nI 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. <\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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<\/i> often, but that will again increase pressure close to the hubs.) <\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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.) <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, not really, but that is what his article bemoaning the growth of cars amounts to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}