Take New Delhi for example. This is a “new city” and much of south Delhi, where I now live, did not exist when Maruti made its appearance in 1984. Now, new cities are usually laid out in a “grid pattern.” Lutyens’ Delhi, of course, was superior, laid out in “hubs-and-spokes,” with Connaught Circus as the main market, with over half-a-dozen “radial roads” leading to it. This part of New Delhi was modeled after Bath, a pretty English town that I had the good fortune to visit.
How did the town planners of The Chacha State lay out the rest of New Delhi? Well, they laid it out in a series of double T-junctions. All the traffic jams on Outer Ring Road between Nehru Place and the airport are because of T-junctions.
This is also true of the Delhi Development Authority’s premier south Delhi residential colony, Vasant Kunj. This huge housing development is laid out along one central road, on which there are over a dozen T-junctions. Traffic crawls in this “new” area.
Further, the markets of Vasant Kunj, like all south Delhi markets, are too many and too small, unlike Connaught Place, which was one big market, a Central Business District (CBD). Even if 5 cars visit a Vasant Kunj market, there is no place to park.
And talking about cars: Vasant Kunj was built for people who owned scooters – this was the “vision” of the future. Every flat here has a “scooter garage.” Today, every flat-owner has two or three cars, and there is no place to park. Residents report that fights regularly break out over parking rights on common spaces, which are too few.
Is it the car at fault, or is it the town planner?
If another enemy of society is to be blamed for this mess, then it is the economists of The Chacha State, including Chacha himself, an economist and former head of the University Grants Commission. For decades, our school and college students have been “studying” this total bullshit called “The Theory of the Vicious Circle of Poverty.” This argues that poverty is inescapable. Poor nations are condemned to remain poor. They need “foreign aid.”
Peter, Lord Bauer dismissed this nonsense with just one sentence:
“If this proposition were true, the whole world would still be in the Old Stone Age.”
Even the USSA started of poor. But they have one of the world’s highest car ownership figures today, at over 850 cars per 1000 population. India is still one of the world’s lowest, at about 13 per 1000; though in cities like New Delhi the figure goes up to about 150 per 1000. This is still low. But it will accelerate at a dizzying pace because poverty is going to vanish one day if The Market gets free play. Our society can either make space for the automobile in our city and town layouts – or continue with chaos.
New Delhi has to be re-laid in parts. We need an aerial Outer Ring Road, and the old Ring Road is not too good either. Areas like Vasant Kunj need to be demolished and rebuilt. We also need to build more and more satellite towns, entirely from scratch, keeping the car in mind, and therefore connecting these satellites to the CBD by good roads.
We need cars. We need roads. We need well laid out cities. It is our town planning that has failed.
For more, read my Four Wheels For All: The Case for the Rapid Automobilization of India, available as a free download here.
There is also my Mint column titled “The Car… And The Planner,” available here.
And Merry Christmas to one and all, especially all automobile enthusiasts.
Do these Architects have any kind of real skills at all apart from drawing some lines?
ReplyDeleteAll I have seen them doing is complain about planning, about environment and the consumption meanwhile worshiping the state.
I remember one story where an urban planner said that cities in excess of 10,000 will be completely out of order. And then these people propose solutions!
Someone needs to shut down the CEPT.