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Transforming urban mobility in India — II
Article: The article critically discusses about the role of e-vehicles in enhancing urban mobility.
- Important Analysis:
1.Electric vehicles (EV) are emerging as an attractive alternative to conventional vehicles.
2 Reasons behind the need for electric vehicles:
• Auto-makers are left with vey few options to further improve the conventional engines.
• Further investments and innovation in conventonal vehicles are not yielding significant returns.
• Deteriorated urban air quality due to less fuel efficiency and exhaust emissions.
• High cost of conventional vehicles drive masses toward low cost e-vehicles. - Benefits of electric vehicles:
• Efficient energy-density, power-density and cost of batteries.
• Low price range in a passenger car has wide acceptablity among users.
• Zero exhaust emissions and lower carbon emissions than conventional cars.
• Environmentalists favour e-vehicles as they limit deterioration in air quality.
• Lower manufacturing cost and extended useful life as compared to conventional engine. - Challenges of e-vehicles :
• E-vehicles need at least 10 sq.m of urban road space exclusively.
• High population densities and high economic activity in urban areas discourage the exclusive space for e-vehicles.
4. Need for urban mobility space rather than e-vehicles:
•E-vehicles alone can’t enhance urban mobility. Cities must improve mass and shared transit capacity.
• Traffic congestion and expensive parking has led to increased popularity of Uber and Ola among urban commuters.
• Digitised economy has multiplier effect on shared-mobility solutions like car-pooling option in cabs.
• Urbanisation has led to displacement of lower income groups to suburbs, so more routes neeed to be explored for commuting.
5.International Best Practices:
• Mexico has defined mobility as a basic human right and this helps steer policies that are inclusive.
• San Francisco and New York have car-pooling option in vans, aggregating 10-12 passengers at a time, further improving footprint and carbon efficiency.
• Such demand-based, dynamically-routed services, mass and shared transit capacity can be enhanced while leveraging private capital.
• Pedestrian zones in Seoul, Barcelona,New York and Bike-lanes and bike-sharing solutions in Amsterdam and Paris need to be learnt from.
• Hong Kong has high density transit corridors like India, so modern metro-rails exist there. India also needs to accelerate investment in all these modeIndia donot need more highways and flyovers, but rather quality side-walks and cycle wayEach city has unique set of constraints. So a combination of investment, policy and regulations are needed for multiple modal transport options.