In My City, Without My Car

From an object of desire, cars will turn into an asset of shared mobility.

- Anumita Roychowdhury

CAR IS one modern gizmo that has powerfully changed the shape of cities and architecture of buildings since its invention. Without the car we would still be designing walkable cities like Chandni Chowk in Delhi and constructing buildings without space to park cars. Only cars allow cities to sprawl, and roads to widen to push out walkers, cyclists and public transport users. This transmutation is locking in enormous pollution, carbon and energy guzzling in the infrastructure.

But cars shaping our lives is not an inevitable destiny which runs the politics around our transport infrastructure and fiscal sops. There are already signs of a big disruption in car-based auto mobility in the future.

Over the next 25 years cars for personal use will become increasingly unattractive. All recent transport sector policies in India, from smart cities to Delhi decongestion plan, advocating designing of cities and roads for people and not for vehicles, need not be glib talk. Even hard numbers from McKinsey show that overall car sales will grow globally but the annual growth rate will drop from 3.6 per cent over the past five years to 2 per cent by 2030. What’s going on?