Fast cars, big cities

The private automobile has joined cable TV in ruining civic life in India’s big cities

Vikram Bedi DELHI
To be automobilised in a grand enough way is a now a universal aspiration among us, the Indian middle-classes. The automobile is so much more than a functional means of mobility. It has become essential to the equipment of self-esteem. Among the upper classes, the car is fetishised as much as bodily appearance. Like jewellery and clothing, the values and pleasures associated with age, sexuality, globality, class status and individuality are condensed into the automobile. Private mobility is an end in itself, youthful, erotic and enchantedly modern. Accordingly, whenever we head off into the wider, public arena by design-intensive motorbike or car we are performing our would-be grandeur, our rhetoric of the self.

The urban drama/dance made possible through mobility in public (and so celebrated by urbanists) is now less about limited bodies than about its aggressive, metallic costume, the private automobile. The roads of metropolitan India have become war-zones, where everyone objectifies both himself and all others (including the law), unequally. Big, sleek sedans may too easily intimidate mere motorcyclists but there is the revenge of the weak: they can wade through traffic whereas big cars are immobilised. Walking or cycling in the city is now much too risky. Thanks to “traffic decongestion” measures and the automobile’s impatient will-to-flow at high speeds, the cyclist, never mind the pedestrian, is a lowly-rated citizen. 

India’s cities have become even more historically hybrid: the age of the cyborg is in the temporal mix too. Prosperous young men talking into their “hands free” phones as they drive their new models, feeling proudly up-to-date and free, are a common sight. The shiny new IT-enabled car with religious markings is a prime symbol of our enchanted new commercial postmodernity.

And so, in big-city, middle-class India developmental grandeur is measured foremost by governments’ ability to six-lane roads, to build flyovers and bypasses. There is much indignation about their inability to keep up with rising automobile-aspirations. Never mind the well-known costs. The illusion of cars as fun, convenience, and modernism has to be sustained, no matter what.

Roads have become the pre-eminent public spaces/arenas of India’s large cities. But, unlike previously dominant forms of public spatial engagement (bazaars, trams and parks), which were civilising, roads are aggressively unequal. Each of us is focussed on his spatial end-point; each is withdrawn, cocooned in by air-conditioning and the car-stereo. Our fellow citizens are only capable of interrupting the serene and self-absorbed progress that we all so desire (or are taught to by advertisements and by the cars themselves.) Our roads, however roomy, are simply too atomised to carry the civic weight of  “public spaces”, which, let us remember, are about equal, dialogic encounters with strangers, about civic friendship, restrained contests, not indifference or war. True public spaces are about friendly friction (public transport) not abrasion. Automobilisation on this scale, then, is corrosive of the civic, in severe deficit as it already is. Like cable television, it further fragments and privatises the urban community, making collective action and cooperation even less likely.

Ironically, it is the market-centric, efficiency-based argument that is strongest in favour of vastly ramped-up public transport provision and the penal taxation of the bigger private vehicles. How so? India’s city roads are a study not in markets-as-efficient-god but in market failure. This is because of the very expensive externalities (pollution, congestion, excessive energy consumption, urban sprawl) that are not factored into market cost-benefit accounting and that are created precisely by the unrestricted and uncoordinated freedom of consumers to add evermore and ever larger, faster vehicles to eventually crawl along choked roads.

The failure of the market for privatised transportation is caused, in the end, by the failure of most automobile consumers to be fully rational, that is, to be future-, fact-, and other-regarding enough. Does the private fancy-automobile purchaser truly factor in the well-known indirect costs (resulting in un-freedom) to him of, say, interminable commutes caused by congestion leading to further time-poverty and aggravation, or the costs to all citizens of the diversion of scarce resources (not least, land) towards futile flyovers and road-widening? Indian car consumers harm both themselves and others when they let their fantasies of empowerment and grandeur get the better of their informed, enlightened self-interest.

This failure causes sub-optimality in other critical markets too: the over-importance of road connectivity distorts land and housing markets. The labour market, too, suffers from the spatial segmentation enforced by urban sprawl. This is especially damaging to the poor—the lack of good, fast, cheap public transport is now a major source of urban poverty and inequality, especially for women.

As usual, whenever market failures are left uncompensated-for by the state, you have state failure as well. But states do not just fail or only because of the apathy/cynicism of state elites. They are often made to fail by civil-social actors. For example, transport policy at the central level is too corrupted by the auto- and component-manufacturer lobbies with their rhetoric of foreign direct investment (FDI) and export possibilities. It is also incontestable that the influential urban middle- and upper-classes have long preferred private solutions to the problems of urban mobility and have therefore never felt public transport to be a prime civic issue. The urban poor have of course been too hard-pressed, too poorly organised, too co-opted to demand their transport rights. And so, as with Indian governance as a whole, we suffer not, as elite prejudice has it, only from governmental failure but, equally and relatedly, from market and civic ones too.

There are residual signs of urban hope, though. Even Delhi’s private-vehicled elites were enthused by the new Metro, suggesting that support for strong public transport interventions is not yet zero, never mind booming car and bike sales. The United Progressive Alliance government’s “Urban Renewal” monies have the potential to catalyse local government action. For example, other Indian megalopolises like Bangalore and Mumbai now want their own metros. Disturbingly, however, it is already clear that these projects are meant more to supplement the private automobile than to supplant or disincentivise it. And, there is a refusal to accept that, like Mumbai’s iconic suburban trains, they need to be subsidised. Doesn’t it betray the public purpose of the Metro for a one-way ticket from east Delhi to its western parts to cost well above 20 rupees? Public transport’s civic potential, its ability to build a city-wide sense of being one public, however complex and conflictual, will also be lost if India’s new Metros exclude the urban poor.

We must acknowledge that it is access to good and inexpensive mobility that is a basic urban capability or right and not the private automobile as badge of identity and status. The larger, more complex and poly-centric the agglomeration, the more essential mass transit becomes for its civic humanisation. Everything from energy security to urban social justice and quality of life is implicated in the putting-in-its-place of the private vehicle. India’s urban elites need to shed their Americanist optic on this issue—the civic death of the US’s hyper-auto-dependent, sprawled cities should serve as cautions rather than inspirations. When defining urban development and excellence should we not look to Western Europe, rather than to the US or, worse, China?