FIGHTING AIR POLLUTION

The Poneer , Monday, December 07, 2015
Correspondent :
Tough to enforce Delhi’s road rationing policy

At one level, it was heartening to see the Delhi High Court’s description last week of the national capital as a “gas chamber”, on account of its alarming air pollution, compel the Government to sit up, pay attention, and in this case, hold an emergency meeting and, a day later, announce a new road rationing strategy: That private cars will ply in the city on alternate days depending on whether their car plates end in odd or even numbers. While there is no doubt that desperate times call for desperate measures, one cannot but be somewhat sceptical of the efficacy of the Government’s new plan.

The details of how the plan will be implemented in Delhi are still unclear but it is safe to say that several logistical issues will have to be considered before the policy comes into effect from January 1 as has been proposed. In the short term, it seems like the plan is to have the traffic police (who will have to be trained first) to manually monitor car movement. This would have worked if the vast majority of the public would follow the rules, leaving the traffic police to only watch out for a handful of errant car owners. However, this is not a realistic assumption.

The only practical solution is to, like Beijing, install automated traffic surveillance camera systems — which again is a long and complicated process, and cannot be done overnight. There are also other related issues that the Government will have to manage like fake car plates, which will proliferate as Delhi commuters try to work their way around the rules. In fact, even if the plan is a success in terms of enforcement, it will not be fool-proof — those who can afford it, will just buy a second car to work around the law. This is what has happened in Mexico City where the Hoy No Circula plan, which goes back to the 1980s, is strictly followed but has still not resulted in an improvement in air quality because commuters just bought more cars instead of taking the bus or sharing a cab.

This brings us to the issue of public transport which has to be at core of any meaningful effort to reduce vehicular pollution. To be fair, Delhi has a fairly decent public transport system, especially when compared to other large Indian cities, but there is still a long way to go before it can put up a serious fight against private transport (and this is without even going into socio-cultural and behavioural issues). For example, the low-floor buses greatly improved Delhi's overall bus service but unpredictable schedules make them an unpopular option; similarly, the Delhi Metro has been a huge success but if only it had better end-point connectivity, it could have reached out to a larger cross-section of city residents.

In other words, until public transport emerges as a realistic alternative to private transport, offering convenient, affordable and on-schedule services, merely penalising private car owners will not make much of a difference. This also applies to other similar measures that are being talked about these days such as significantly increasing parking fees, shutting down parking at malls, imposing taxes on car users. These are all negative measures that will only bring results if positive measures are also taken up in earnest — such as scaling up public transport and investing in clean technology for private transport.

 
SOURCE : http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnists/edit/fighting-air-pollution.html
 


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