Transforming urban mobility in India — II

Transforming urban mobility in India — II

Article: The article critically discusses about the role of e-vehicles in enhancing urban mobility.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.