[dreamliner17]

Making the 'Second largest' populated country (infact developing country) to follow a rule/system which is implemented in a much smaller scale sounds absolutely difficult to me !

We complain a lot. Obviously , because we live in the urban-settlements or the 'metropolitan' areas. Consider a rural environment ( since India is majorly agrarian and the people have their farms nearby), i don't think people in the rural areas have much to complain about( atleast as far as traffic is concerned). Even when they do have to travel long distances, they may use the trains and bus services or they might have their own MPV/SUV.

Coming back to the highly populated Indian cities - Consider any - Largely the problem lies in management and particularly 'mismanagement'. Inspite of certain rules being present, we gain a certain enjoyment in not adhering to them (Particulary traffic rules !).
The overly crowded trains in which the motorman is beaten up because of 'being late' is no justification at all (Inspite of the train frequencies being about 5 min apart ! and we seldom realise that even the motorman is a human being). We get enraged whenever an auto/taxi/bus blocks our path and we try our own ways of letting 'him' know that we were stuck behind it and offended by that. The taxi/ auto wont run on the meter, the taxi/auto will refuse to take you to your destination - a common practise. "The AC buses are seldom comfortable. The AC bus fare revision is unjustified. The bus fare revision is unjustified. The Metro fare revision is unjustified. There are potholes everywhere. There in unnecessary 'repair work' going on, on the roads." - Yes we have our complains. I am included in that. Inspite of all this, i m yet CLUELESS as to what the 'secret' formula is , to have a well balanced well synchronized highly efficient ( in time and money) transport system that can solve our problems !

[Deepak K Gupta]

Before we think of a quota system, let us sit back and think. Do we want less vehicles and chaotic roads or more vehicles and disciplined traffic. Singapore is a very small country and it introduced the quota only after their perfectly disciplined traffic system and strict pollution laws were continuing to deteriorate their eco-system.
Actually we do not have a vehicle problem in India at all. We have a discipline problem. Correct that and we can have Singapore like roads in India. Even Singapore has very tough discipline laws which everyone knows. For doing this we need to introduce hefty fines and strictly implement them. If we can do this most traffic woes will disappear.
Some of the things we need to control:
Violation of No Entry
Violation of Traffic Signals
Violation of Stop Line
Violation of Centre Line
Violation of lane change
Violation of No Parking
Violation of No Infiltration
Violation of Bus and Auto stops at and near crossings

[MaheshY1]

Originally Posted by roy_libran

What we really need (IMHO) are:
1. Something similar to a congestion charge for Metro Cities, and it needs to be steep.
2. Penalize lone person travel in a vehicle, by prescribing steep differential toll rates.
3. Push aggressively for smaller cars (less than 4 m is't small enough). This would help reduce the total footprint and emissions (lesser weight to haul).
4. Reward and promote systems to assure safety of Two Wheeler Drivers in cities.
5. Penalize large cars by significantly higher tolls, significantly higher taxes and significantly higher congestion charges.

I for one totally agree with the fact that we should seriously consider the smaller cars for their small footprint (in emissions as well as literally.) Given the choice between a sedan and its hatchback sibling, I'd choose the smaller one IF there are no other differences.

Promoting safety is another area that needs to be looked into.

Consider the following scenario:

I want to buy a car that has:
1. ABS
2. EBD
3. ESC
4. 100-150 HP (for relaxed highway cruising)
5. Hatchback
6. 10 Airbags (yeah you read that right)

Now what car could be suggested? One has to go for a big car (read:huge.)
Why should someone be penalized for choosing safety?

I have a Beat, sold in US as Spark. There it comes with 1.4 Turbo petrol and all of the safety features I mentioned.
2 thorax airbags
4 curtain airbags
2 front airbags
2 knee airbags

I think it's OK to go for a safe car instead of a small car if the budget permits.

[Car-go-man]

Originally Posted by rav11stars

According to JNNURM "According to the 2001 census, India has a population of 1027 million with approximately 28per cent or 285 million people living in urban areas.
As a result of the liberalization policies adopted by the Government of India is expected to increase the share of the urban population may increase to about 40 per cent of total population by the year 2021. It is estimated that by the year 2011, urban areas would contribute about 65 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). However, this higher productivity is contingent upon the availability and quality of infrastructure services."

At the 2001 census 72.2% of the population lived in about 638,000 villages and the remaining 27.8% lived in more than 5,100 towns and over 380 urban agglomerations. Source:Wikipedia

This to me is the biggest hurdle for having a better infrastructure.

Take Bangalore for instance. The city just keeps growing everyday and the corresponding infrastructure hasn't been able to catch up with the pace at which the city is growing and it may never probably catch up with it if it goes on like this.

We need more urban cities per state instead of one major city that gets overcrowded and unmanageable. It is highly impossible to cater to the citizens' needs if this is not done.

[igybeck]

More than anything the lobbying efforts of auto manufacturers will stop this even in the initial phase. India has become an important market for cars. The sheer power of global plus domestic manufacturers will kill this anytime.
I guess this might happen 50+ years down the line. Definitely not in the near future.

[alpha1]

Vehicle quota?
What else do you have in plan for quota next ...?

India thankfully has moved over from communist tendencies of quotas and license and you want us to move back to that era?


Remember - capitalism works only because people like to own things.

[bhaskar.guru]

Originally Posted by sandeep108

The last point should be first! Better public transport.

With Delhi Metro starting, though not apparent, large number of cars have reduced. See the roaring success of the Metro on the Andheri Ghatkopar stretch - again vehicles have reduced considerably.

Why has our governments and local bodies not learnt from cities like Singapore, London, etc. even after so many 'study' tours? Instead of increasing AC buses, BEST is talking of discontinuing them! Several times I have taken an AC bus earlier, nowadays the frequency is so bad, I have to take my car. Just increase AC buses at reasonable fares, forget car owners, even two wheelers will prefer the comfortable AC buses. Increase of local rail lines are stalled for some reason or other. Proper connections to local rail/metro/mono for last leg connectivity with seamless payment methods. Easy smart card payments across all tolls and public transport. All relatively easily achievable but of course if government actually did governance...

Sadly there is no move even being made towards better public transport.

Agree with you on the point that we need better public transport and if it is present, we would gladly take it.

Story in Hyderabad is that though the govt has introduced 80 new AC buses, there are a couple of issues with it which have led to less than 30% occupancy overall:
1. 2 or 3 buses run back to back instead of running at different intervals.
2. The rates are too high for the usual public, Rs.2000 for a monthly pass and ~Rs.120 for an end to end single trip of about 40 kms.

Secondly, just back from a trip to Mumbai, a couple of observations:
a. they should actually merge all the 3 city bus corporations(Thane, BEST, Navi Mumbai) and create a single entity which enables the consumers to use one pass across all the services and travel the entire Mumbai without any hesitation.
b. The buses need to standardized, for e.g. the Thane and Navi Mumbai transport corps have the latest Volvo buses as AC buses where as the BEST corp has old Ashok Leyland buses. Haven't seen any volvos with BEST.

As per me, the transport authorities have enough resources, they need to manage them better while increasing their fleet as well.

[anvara]

With all due respect to the thoughts to the OP, I would dread to think of such an idea. What would then happen to petrol heads (or diesel as the case may be) like us?

Hypothetically speaking, if this were to be implemented, it may start off on a good note but then our politicians would find a nice way to ensure the common man is deprived of the luxury of buying / driving vehicles of their choice eventually making life miserable for any of the folks planning to buy personal vehicles. On the other hand, as someone stated here, they would happily run around town with a huge convoy at our expense.

No sir, not for me. Think the current system is fine. Again, as Deepak said, discipline is the need of the hour not quota.

[CarJunki]

Not so long ago there were quotas for automobile production numbers.
Essentially meaning you could not buy as there was no production.

That system failed miserably and India moved out of that. Why go back to something which has been proven to not work within our own nation?

[latentpotential]

Vehicle Quota is a good thought, but what then? Someone (maybe myself) will always bypass it using the MP/ MLA quota, Grease quota, Chaipaani quota? Not going to be something that can be implemented in India at least.

[ashishmathur14]

Vehicle Quota can never be implemented in a country like India and rather should also be not talked about specially in comparison to a country like Singapore.

There are multiple reasons we cannot cap buying a car or start a trend towards buying smaller cars.

- Top of the list - Lack of Public Transport - Mumbai/Delhi I would say are two cities with best public transport and one still needs own vehicle at most times, Even to commute to nearest station which are not at walking distance in most cases. Car has moved into a necessity asset rather once called a luxury.

- Safety of Traveler - Our cities are not safe enough to travel alone during night or even day at places. Whatever public transport we have is also a major hub or eve teasing or harassment cases. A car is considered safest for any commuter.

- Smaller cars does not fulfill the purpose as we need to have proper boot to carry luggage whenever required. The Taxi services are not abundant, Safe or cheap to used frequent. Moreover, in a price sensitive market all the major safety features are missing from smaller cars.

- Any system which would put a cap on buying a car would result in gross corruption, as one would have to pay to buy a car and gain a certificate to be eligible buyer, Moreover, Even if i cannot buy and i can drive, it would create nexus of car rents where people would buy cars ad run them on rents.

- As mentioned by a fellow, Common man would still struggle in scorching sun and run behind a local train or a bus.

Although What needs to be/can be implemented is below :
- Cut down the convoys of politicians
- Improve Public transport to a real high level in all cities.
- Make safer cars, specially the smaller ones.
- R&D on more fuel efficient engines
- Subsidize hybrid cars like Mahindra Evo/Reva
- Encourage public to buy Hybrid cars
- Encourage car pooling
- Encourage corporate to provide transport so employees use less cars, companies with good transport facilities have lesser number of people bringing their own vehicles.

Before putting any restrictive laws which directly impacts common man, there should be good alternatives available , else it will always result in corruption.

[noopster]

Originally Posted by rav11stars

I've heard from one of my friends that in Singapore anyone cannot buy a car there. I got interested and searched.

I've lived in Singapore and the compliance rate with government regulations is nearly 100% there. People are so law-abiding that the police used to run a campaign called "Low Crime Doesn't Mean No Crime"! Ironic then that we were actually victims of a crime (wife's handbag got stolen in a restaurant)...but I digress!

The reason such measures won't work in India is:

Originally Posted by pgsagar

Vehicle quota? In India? Are you serious? Don't even put such silly ideas in our authorities heads. Because if you do then it is you who will pay the price. Ordinary citizens like most of us would be sweating it out at a bus stop with car parked at home while the VIPs would merrily be driving around with a 10-car convoy.

and

Originally Posted by ashishmathur14

Before putting any restrictive laws which directly impacts common man, there should be good alternatives available , else it will always result in corruption.

It will be a true certificate of entitlement in India, trust me! A new car will become a status symbol and vehicles will go not to those who need them but those who manipulate the system well enough.

Also, India is way too big an entity to consider drastic measures like this. We could howver try something like this:

Originally Posted by mayuresh

Mumbai High Court has asked the State Govt to create procedure to make a car buyer prove that he has got a parking place. Otherwise his vehicle won't be registered.

Not just Mumbai, even Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Kolkata would benefit tremendously if simple measures are put in place- top of the list being accessible and comfortable public transport. What's doubly sad is that our authorities don't learn from these failed models and so keep replicating the same stuff everywhere. I predict, for example, that Pune will be exactly like Bangalore is today in 10 years time.

[nareshov]

Originally Posted by mayuresh

This thread coincides with this news:

Mumbai High Court has asked the State Govt to create procedure to make a car buyer prove that he has got a parking place. Otherwise his vehicle won't be registered.

http://www.loksatta.com/mumbai-news/...wners-1065845/

Looks like an inspiration from Japan: http://www.reinventingparking.org/20...-rule-has.html

Dates back to the early 60s. Heh.

[alpha1]

Originally Posted by mayuresh

This thread coincides with this news:

Mumbai High Court has asked the State Govt to create procedure to make a car buyer prove that he has got a parking place. Otherwise his vehicle won't be registered.

http://www.loksatta.com/mumbai-news/...wners-1065845/

And what document will the RTO accept as proof of having a parking place?
Most of the land papers will only mention 'a parking place', but not demarcate it on a map or even mention square feet area.

The proposed system will fail in such cases.
What about the individual plot houses?

[poised2drive]

Car quota is a great system for Singapore because

1. It is a complete urban area which implies high [ extremely, in this case] traffic density.

2. It is an island brought into use by land reclamation due to the fact that Singapore suffers from 'land starvation'

3. Rule abiding citizens as well as benevolent political officers are such a rare species in our country that any system would be transformed into cash-extracting phenomena which is due to high levels of Social illiteracy [ we are a bunch of literates not educated and thus 70% literacy does not tantamount 70 Cr disciplined citizens] which is almost in contrary to the Singapore situation -where people are disciplined.


Despite the other deficiencies like security concerns and exorbitant investment, the most feasible solution that the Govt. can provide to address this traffic congestion is to develop better infrastructure for public transport.

The public transport here includes Metro trains, buses [mini-buses , where required.] and when looked at all metropolitan cities of our country, the buses are always

The most frustrating obstacle to execute and operate an efficient Public transport is the haphazardly developed cities which lack a proper layout where colonies and industrial areas mushroomed in the most unorganized way. The paramount plan of action for the govt. is to draw out designs and layouts for these ill-planned cities and then to fit a coherent public transport system. In here again, some cities like Mumbai or Chennai do not pose much problem due to their 'parallel to coast' [ North to South]development unlike Hyderabad or Bangalore which has swollen in all directions.

And until this unsystematic growth is controlled and siphoned into a planned one, it has to allow the private players or corporates to operate [ if the Govt. cannot organize the public transport in all areas], at certain places because there are locations in cities where it will be not profitable to run buses but usage of service-taxis/autos are advantageous due to the narrow roads and low passenger occupancy. While these are already being operated, they have to be regularized and controlled and cannot allowed to mushroom.