Smart cities should be really smart

Subject: Smart cities should be really smart
Infrastructure improvement is my favourite topic of thinking, day dreaming, and hence I have lots of thoughts on how an ideal city infrastructure should be. I am penning down those thoughts here for your reading pleasure so you can also have some sweet dreams.
Any feedback is always welcome and if you can help spreading this so it reaches government authorities nothing like that.
Being spend most part of life in cities like Bhopal, Indore, Pune and Bangalore I can easily feel the pain of living in these big cities with incompetent municipal corporation to govern and manage them. The municipal corporation have become the tools of political parties to push their self-centric agenda rather than to provide and continuously improve the quality of living of people. All we see are quick fixes to the basic issues at the time of local elections and a long wait thereafter.
Though, reforming the Municipal corporations is the most important task in preparing futuristic smart cities I’ll not discuss it here as it’s a political discussion altogether.
I am sharing my thoughts, on how a smart city or should I say a MODEL city in India should be and a brief summary of how it can be achieved.
Traffic Jam or Congestion on roads: In my opinion traffic jams or road congestions are the no. 1 problem of any big city with of over 10 lac population and should be addressed with topmost priority.
Traffic Jams are caused mostly due to following reasons:
• Reason: Only one main road connecting two areas resulting in all the vehicles from one area coming out on that main road, travel the required distance and then diverging to different destinations, as a result the main road is always congested.
• Solution: Analyse all such bottle necks and create/make parallel roads to connect two areas which would result in even distribution of traffic and not overloading one particular road.
• Reason: Lack of adequate and convenient public transport. Public transport development in India is poor at the best. There are big projects undertaken in major cities like Metro rail in Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Mumbai but nowhere the focus is on comprehensive solution i.e. to provide last mile connectivity to the customers, neither the routes were decided after giving serious thoughts, as is case with Bangalore metro. All these, result in people using private vehicles as it provides end to end connectivity no matter how much time they spend on road.
• Solution: A panel of experts should be hired by each municipal corporation to guide them about the planning and execution of all projects related to public transport. Instead of focusing on a single pronged approach like Metro Rail only, a multi-pronged approach should be considered after understanding the requirements of areas within the cities and then doing the feasibility check as which of the available mode of transport will work best. For Metro cities both road and rail transports are required where road transport like buses acts as feeder to the rail transport like local trains in Mumbai or Metro trains in Delhi.
• Reason: Exponential growth and irresponsible usage of private vehicles. Due to economic growth in the country in last decade and half many people are able to buy 4 wheelers now which resulted in many fold increase in private vehicles at the same time infrastructure not keeping up the pace. Also the irresponsible usage of vehicles among its owners is compounding the problem. Nowadays a person can be seen using a 4 wheeler even for the shortest of distance even if it’s walkable. Also 80% of vehicles on road have one person (driver) inside it which is a criminal wastage of the road space at the same time result in congestions.
• Solution: Ownership of private vehicles should be discouraged by making the vehicle purchase running and maintenance costlier. Following points will help
o Scrap the life time road tax during the purchase of new vehicles instead increase the registration and the insurance charges thereby increasing the overall cost of ownership
o Make running of vehicles expensive by including the following charges in to the fuel price:
 Net fuel price including all taxes
 Road tax as a % of the net fuel price and
 Pollution surcharge as a % of net fuel price (should be variable higher for more polluting fuel as diesel and lower for less polluting as LPG or CNG)
 All components of the fuel price should be printed separately on the receipt reminding owner every time how costly it is to maintain a vehicle.
 Abandon the concept of reserved and free parking spaces except inside housing society. Make all the parking spaces chargeable at a uniform rate throughout the city.
 A vehicle should always cost its owner no matter if it’s running or parked, this would encourage the use of public transport for commute.

Pollution: Vehicular emissions through fuel and horn are the major source of air and noise pollutions respectively and hence a check is required on both as explained below to reduce the pollution.
 Control the overall number of vehicles on road by following the point above
 Include large scale promotion of green vehicles (electric or fuel cell) for within city commute which happens only when cost of ownership of green vehicles is lesser than those of carbon fuel based vehicle
 A comprehensive study to understand the final cost to the owner has to be done and price and taxes rationalisation should be initiated by the government
 Petrol and Diesel vehicles should be used mainly for intercity travelling whereas within city electric vehicles should be encouraged
 The decibel limit of the horn should be reduced by regulation and all vehicle manufacturers should comply with it. For existing vehicles a mandate should be given to retrofit with new low decibel horns
 An overall sense of discipline need to be instilled in the drivers of the vehicles to minimise honking while driving. All driving schools should include it as part of their training curriculum.

Though there are other factors which are required to be included in the discussion of a Model city, I am limiting my points on these two major problems so as to have a focussed debate/discussion.
Cheers. more