The Car. The Bus. The India

Summary: How long a country of billion can sustain with a culture of "My car My way"? Given the situation today, we will not be able to support even a extra car on the roads during peak hour? In this article, I will highlight few of the other problems other than traffic mess to highlight where we are heading. Few of these problems must be solved otherwise like a slow poison we can feel the deterioration but by the time we realize the reason it will be too late.

Details:  Urban crawling is a common phenomenon in any modern city. Around the peak hour (according to a study) most of the city traffic moves less than the speed of horse (16 Km/hr).  Horse was the most common transportation mode till 1906.Still every day we hear industrial output increasing faster than ever, people are buying cars faster than ever. Though I agree cars are faster than public transport ( in current situation) and definitely only few can afford it today. But as things are changing more and more people are capable of affording cars. What will happen if billion people of our country are able to buy a car. 

To highlight one of the small problem of today is parking. Consider that how many hours you travel in a day. Apart from these hours we have to park our vehicle.And a funny thing is people have smaller area alloted at work place compared to the area covered by their parked vehicle in their office. So one obvious question what are we working for? To make our cars occupy bigger and bigger area compared to our workstation. 

Most of the cars are using petrol/disel (fossil fuel)  today. These fossil fuel is definitely explosive material ( How??) . These are produced at the worlds most disturbed section "Gulf"/ There are multiple politics and wars have been played to control these fossil resources. These are source of lot of money with no effort. This easily earned petro dollars are used for various purposes and one of them is sponsoring terrorism. We live under threat of terror and we are the ones who are encouraging it. 

The car industry is very critical in today's economy. In fact anything which makes money is very important for economy and hence auto segment is crucial. According to government, if people buy more cars, they pay more taxes with that money we create employment. I do not want to explain this kind of progress but would like to share an interesting argument, I read while reading "Small is Beautiful". The argument goes like this " if every mother starts taking care of neighbors kid ( day careor similar) instead of her own and start charging for it , GDP will have boost of at least 2%". Thus we need to understand that everything we are doing is generating value the only difference is that government is not able to tax everything and hence do not include it in the GDP. Similarly government today is taking more loan to sustain infra projects worth thousands of crores to get the cars running where today cities are begging for power, citizens are asking for better health care.

I am not against car, car is good and important when you go to the picnic. But car is no less than the curse if you are using it for office. If you are using car for office you are not only making yourself late for the office but also missing quality time which you could have with your family without driving stress.Going with your family for shopping and picnic in your car is better because you are not late for your family, but when you are using it for your office you are late for your family and making other late as well.

There are lot of other point which can be listed here. My intension is to make one think how he should be going to office. The choice has to be wise enough not only to keep ourself healthy but keep others healthy and happy. If we do not act today, we will reach to a day when at the peak hours on the road, we might feel suffocation because oxygen is shared not only with the humans but also with combustion engine of our cars.

In the end an appeal to readers, to use Bus on the Bus day ( 4th Feb 10). Lets help each other to make not only better but responsible system. By giving bus a chance on the Bus day please observe the changes happened around you. These changes could be fresh air, less driving stress. In response to your contribution BMTC has committed to observe, collect data about the travel pattern of the people and improve on its services going forward.