Bicycles and rickshaws in India: Four wheels good, two wheels bad

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

TRAVEL within any Indian city is usually crowded and slow. But Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), capital of West Bengal, has certain advantages. Its underground rail network, which was the first to open in India in 1984, is being extended. Uniquely in the country, electric trams clatter along its streets. Public transport may look dilapidated but it functions reasonably well: urban ferries, suburban trains, smoky buses and motorised rickshaws shunt around the city’s 14m residents.

Driving, however, often means sitting for hours in traffic jams. Part of the problem is that only 6% of the densely populated city is devoted to roads, and many are in poor shape. Adding to the snarl-ups, drivers have to navigate among pedestrians, human-propelled vegetable carts, cyclists, cows and roughly 8,000 hand-pulled rickshaws.

To speed the flow, five years ago the city police tried to separate engine-propelled travellers from the rest, banning “non-motorised vehicles” from 38 bigger roads during daylight. This year, faced with worsening congestion, the ban has been substantially extended: to 174 roads, covering much of the city centre. That has provoked fury among the poor and among environmentalists.

The ban appears unjust. Travel is made harder for the poorest residents—who can be fined 100 rupees ($1.60) for pedalling on the wrong roads—for the sake of speedier journeys for the wealthy. Anumita Roy Chowdhury, a Bengali public-transport analyst, notes that it does nothing to ease the dreadful levels of pollution. Pedal-powered trips account for 11% of urban journeys, slightly more than trips by car, according to a 2008 survey.

Elsewhere in India lip service at least is paid to cycling for its supposedly healthy and green attributes—even though few who can afford to do otherwise choose to get sweaty in the saddle. One or two cycle lanes have sprouted in Chennai and Delhi. Hyderabad is building cycle parks alongside its new metro system. Posters in the national capital urge people to pedal for shorter journeys; and a few bicycles can be hired from a roadside shed in Delhi.

Officials in Kolkata insist that they have cyclists’ interests in mind. They want to protect them against accidents on big roads, and they even claim the ban has an anti-terrorist purpose, noting that bicycle bombs were used, for example, in an attack in Hyderabad in February. But critics such as Ms Roy Chowdhury are unconvinced. She says efforts to speed up motorised traffic will serve merely to lure more cars to the roads. It would be far better if Kolkata renovated its decent public transport infrastructure, as in Delhi, and built more paths for cyclists. “We are not even nurturing what we have inherited”, she says.

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