Continuing our “Talking About Transitions” series, we held a dialogue titled “Transitioning Urban Transport for Low Carbon Mobility” on October 4, 2024, where we explored various approaches to achieving low carbon mobility.
Our expert panel—featuring Anna Walter-Dockx, Behaviour Designer at Austria’s largest mobility provider (ÖBB), Karthikeyan Kuppu, an urban mobility consultant, Surjyatapa Ray Choudhury, Urban Designer, Jana Urban Space, and Shantha Venugopal, Research Associate at Transitions Research. We will soon be releasing a blog based on the insights acquired from this discussion. Follow us on our social media channels to stay tuned.
You can watch the dialogue here:
You can read a transcript of the dialogue below:
Shantha Venugopal 00:00
Welcome everyone. I’m going to kick us off with a little introduction. My name is Shanta. I’m a Research Associate here at Transitions Research, and I am part of the PULL or the People’s Urban Living Lab team. I’ve done some work on mobility policy in Panjim, which is one of our project cities. For anyone who is new to this, the Talking About Transitions series features critical conversations on systemic transitions, at the interplay of technology, society and sustainability. So to understand a little bit more about how we’re going to kick off the discussion, I will give you a brief description of what we’re going to get into.
The way we move contributes to almost a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions world over, much of which are derived from cities, whether we choose to use public transport to walk or to cycle or to take a private vehicle to travel, contributes to rising greenhouse gas emissions. The situation in India is no different from that. Over the last 20 years, India has experienced a surge in mobility and transport related emissions, with GHD emissions increasing 224% between 2020 19 cities which are rapidly growing, have felt the brunt of this shift, with many cities experiencing unbearable congestion, poor public transport provision and rising air pollution India is at a pivotal moment to shape the future of transport emissions, especially given that only 30% of urban residents currently rely on private vehicles.
With our radical interventions in city design and normative shifts away from private vehicles, we run the risk of driving urban emissions to unsustainable levels, which is in direct conflict, of course, with our net zero and climate goals. The push towards sustainable mobility rests on a few key ideas, one of which is non-motorized transport. There’s dense and transit-oriented development and related concepts like 15-minute cities, the electrification of mobility to reduce emissions and the need for massive shifts towards public transport.
In this conversation, we aim to explore both approaches to urban mobility in the context of sustainable development in cities, mostly in the global south. So, we want to ask, what are the challenges in implementing innovative ideas and mobility, like concepts like the 15-minute cities or walkable cycle cities? Can electrification really transform mobility emissions as much as we think that it can? And what happens after we design and plan for cities, what social and behavioural changes are needed to transition transport and finally, what kind of mobility systems do we need for a low carbon future? I’m going to talk right now, quite a bit while I introduce everybody, but then I will be handing it off to the speakers, so I’m going to quickly introduce them all.
So, we are lucky to have Anna Walter-Dockx, who is a behavioural economist and expert on fostering sustainable habits. In the last seven years, she has consulted more than 20 public and private sector clients and facilitated behaviour change in areas such as waste management and mobility. One of her favourite projects was a field experiment on reducing littering in Vienna social housing with over 70,000 participants impacted. Currently, Anna is working on shaping the transport of tomorrow as a behaviour designer within Australia’s Austria’s largest mobility provider, OBB. Welcome Anna.
Second, we have Karthik Kupu, who is a strategy consultant with six years of experience across India, the US, Canada and the UAE. He has a background in non-motorized transport, public transport, mobility as a service, AC, ES mobility and first mile, last mile strategies. His expertise spans across digital transformation, product development and strategic planning domains, particularly within mobility startups, automated companies and public transport agencies. His work focuses on leveraging data and technology to drive innovation and efficiency in urban mobility projects. Karthik holds a Masters of planning, of City Planning from MIT, where he was a researcher at the urban mobility lab and a battle of architecture from IIT Kharagpur.
Surjyatapa Choudhury is our third speaker. She’s a researcher and urban design practitioner who incorporates systems thinking, sustainable design and construction and socially inclusive architecture into her work. She’s currently associated with Jana urban space Foundation, where her responsibilities include drafting policy and knowledge products, advocacy, government, engagement and conducting research at the intersection of public space design, gender equity, climate sensitivity and social inclusivity. Previously, she worked as an urban designer at Nikken Sakei in Tokyo and as an architect in Ahmedabad, and she’s the recipient of the Norman Foster foundation 2019 on cities fellowship.
Welcome everyone. I hope we’re going to have a really great discussion today, and thank you all participants for joining so far. Finally, I will let them speak as experts on mobility, and I’ll kick us off with a question for all of the panellists, what does sustainable and low carbon mobility look like in cities and developing countries? So what needs to change and who is responsible for those shifts? I will open it up to whoever wants to answer first.
Anna Walter-Dockx 07:00
Okay, I can go ahead. Well, clearly walking and biking, so active mobility is nice, but I think if we’re talking about developing countries and so on, the focus, given your population numbers, is really on public transport. And I’m not talking about buses or On Demand shuttles, but really about mass transit. So, trains, double decker metros and so on. And for me, a second key aspect is the so-called just transition. So that’s important anywhere, but I would say even more so in developing countries, we know that the mobility habits of the wealthiest and the most vulnerable parts of a society differ very much. And so that’s their carbon emission profile also. And so, a just transition, for me, has released two aspects of fairness and inclusivity. What I mean by fairness is we can’t have just the vulnerable bear the burden or the effort of engaging in low carbon mobility. It needs to be a shared responsibility, and policies need to make sure that everyone contributes according to their needs, especially the very wealthy population. This is fairness. Inclusivity, is everyone needs to be able to use these systems to use public transport. For example, if I make the footpath wider because I want to have the woman with her stroller, it also benefits groups or friends who might want to walk next to each other, and it’s not so much of a sacrifice as we’re always painting it. And now, who carries the responsibility? I already touched a bit upon that. And as a behavioural scientist, my daily work is to change individual people’s behaviour. But that won’t suffice. The time’s ticking, and I do think we need systemic change. So it needs to be very clear and indisputable that sustainable mobility is the way to go, and policies need to shape norms to that. And I think that the city of Bogota has a very beautiful example of the cyclopia, where they shut down the city every Sunday to cars and people can just use the street for biking, for skating, whatever. So, it is possible. And if you have a vision, then you need to try to make that reality very fast.
Shantha Venugopal 09:22
Yeah, absolutely, that’s so true. And I believe justice and fairness in our transitions has come, is going to come up a lot throughout this conversation, and I hope so too. Can I get Surjyatapa to answer as well?
Surjyatapa Choudhury (8:45)
Yeah, I think very interesting point, Anna, but yeah, just going back to the original question and framing it from my perspective, I think we need to look, and this is, this is very specific to India, I would say, but I would say also applies to global south cities. We need to look at the way people move, and not at what takes up the most amount of space on a road. Right, which is to move to a people-centric and services-centric and shift from the car-centric perspective that currently we have in India. Just picking up some numbers, a little bit outdated because they’re based on census 2011: 80% of commuters in India travel on foot for distances up to one kilometre. Between two to five kilometres, the share of walkers’ range between 50 to 75%. In the same kilometre range, 75% of trips are either by walking, cycling or public transport. Women primarily use buses or walking as their primary mode of transit, as per again, census, 2011. 84% of their trips to work were either by public IPT or walking and cycling, mostly walking, little less cycling. 50% of children walk to school, 18% cycle, 9% of children use public buses. I think if we can build infrastructure that speaks to this data, we are already enabling a significant shift to low carbon mobility, building roads that enable walking, cycling and use of public transport. I think these are the three primary concerns that we need to target head on to ensure a better penetration of public transport across every city. And here, I think e mobility does come in. But I think even when we speak about e mobility, we need to look at we can’t just say that E vehicles are going to solve the problem unless we have an entire clean transition for energy at source, right? So, as we are speaking about low emission zones and low carbon mobility, I think that’s something that we need to keep at the back of our mind. And finally, I think we need to start looking at planning as an enabler to ensure that all our basic services and amenities are within a 15-minute walking and cycling distance. So, start planning more at a local level and not at the city level. That is also necessary, but I think this is more implementable and project centric if we get the steps right. I think we have already solved for a significant part of this transition to low carbon mobility, and in terms of who is responsible for this shift, I feel like every stakeholder has a part to play in decisions and bureaucrats have their part to play. They are the ones who are basically the implementing authorities, right? So I think the significant amount of change needs to come in their mindsets, but also as technical experts, as researchers, as policy experts, sitting around the table here, a big part of the onus is on us to aggressively advocate for this type of change. Finally, it’s also about the consumers, right? Because a large part of the push also comes from them. People also need to start accepting and realising that, yes, pedestrians might be like an invisible segment on the road like you do not actually, because the car takes up the most amount of space, you’re automatically thinking that that is what you need to design the road for. But as consumers, you and I, we also need to start thinking differently, changing our perspective on how people and services and goods actually travel in Indian cities and villages as well. And I think, yeah, so it’s, it’s sort of like across every stakeholder, there has to be some amount of shifts that needs to happen. I’ll stop here.
Shantha Venugopal:
No, definitely that. That’s a very interesting point as well about how many people are already walking and how over the next couple of years that’s likely to change right as people’s means improve. Hopefully, if we’re still designing for cars, and they’re going to want to get to that level, upscale, whatever they’re doing, and get a vehicle of their own, rather than planning to walk somewhere like it almost seems like your way out of that is to get a car, as opposed to making that infrastructure more accessible. And it’s funny, you also brought up how electric mobility is not as encompassing a solution. And actually, Karthik, told me in our last call, that electric mobility only reduces tailpipe emissions to zero, so it’s not actually zero emissions, which I don’t think a lot of people know. So on that note, I’ll, I’ll let you speak more on that.
Karthik Kuppu 14:21
Sure. Thanks, Shantha. I think most of the points I wanted to say were covered by Anna and Surjyatapa. But just to add on top of that, one of the quotes that really resonate with me is one from the mayor of Bogota. He says that, you know, a really developed country is not where the poor own cars. It’s one where the rich take public transport. And I think that kind of encapsulates so many points that need to be changed in developing countries such as India for us to move towards low carbon mobility. The entire idea of cars being a symbol of status, something that people hold on to, rather than its functionality, something that drives a lot of the choices that Indians make here when it comes to taking public transport, or taking a private vehicle. I think bringing a behavioural shift will drive what is needed, which is the modal shift towards public transport. We all know public transport is very low, low in carbon emissions compared to an ordinary private vehicle. And also, when we compare the lifecycle emissions of private electric vehicles, definitely public transport is a winner. So, the entire modal shift is something that needs to be first pushed in India. Along with that, I think when that modal shift happens, like Anna said, we shouldn’t be leaving the vulnerable populations, especially ones at the margin behind. You know, making special, special provisions for people with disabilities, special provisions for women like this idea brought in Chennai, where there are certain buses that run free for women. Enabling certain groups to travel on public transport is very, very essential. And that brings me to answer the last part of your question, which is that the kind of enabler here would be policies you have the carrot and the stick. The carrot is definitely more effective than the stick. We need to incentivize that move, be it through mobility as a service, through digital means, through data, make it easier to take, end to end, public transport, especially in that being the first and last mile bit, that’s the biggest challenge. So, I think moving in the policy direction, in one that has incentives rather than regulations and legislation, is the way to go for India.
Shantha Venugopal 17:12
So, I think the points that reached across, and I feel actually everyone did add something completely new to this discussion. But it seems like the two sides of it are the justness and fairness aspect. On the one hand, the ‘just’ part means that all the infrastructure that currently doesn’t seem to cater so much to vulnerable populations, with pedestrianisation being a key solution for that, that’s one half of it. And then the ‘fairness’ part, which is trying to get people to see, not only behaviourally, in terms of status shifts and things like that, that public transport is the way to go, but to incentivize it and make it so accessible and available to people that they all are actually happy to use it instead of using it because of the emissions or any other reason. So yeah, I think this is a great start, and now I can jump into asking you individual questions. So, the first one is for Surjyatapa: in India and many countries across the global South, cities exhibit high levels of spatial segregation, right? So, what strategies can be employed to ensure, or to at least begin to, put in place the 15-minute city concept, where all essential services are located within a 15-minute walk for all residents, especially if it is to promote inclusivity and avoid reinforcing socio-economic exclusion.
Surjyatapa Choudhury 18:36
It’s so interesting that you ask about special segregation, because this is something that, you know, I think every planner sort of faces that at some point in their career or in their academic career – when we were working on 15 minutes, 15 minute neighbourhoods, this is something that was there somewhere in the back of our heads.
But I’ll start from somewhere else, like if we just observe the planning and development trajectory of any country or city or state, there is a very interesting nexus I feel, between urbanisation, development and affordability. The more rapidly a city, a state, country, urbanises, the demand for development, which is the provision of good quality services and amenities, increases, right? Because you need to cater to more people getting access to an equal number of services. The more development you have, it will automatically raise land value, etc. too. Maybe my co-panellists can share their thoughts on this perhaps better, from different perspectives, but one inevitable outcome of development is that specific areas in the city will become unaffordable to low-income populations. This is not just related to housing, it is not just housing affordability. It is also related to how accessible and affordable the produce markets are, how affordable schooling is in that neighbourhood, and how affordable your daycare centres are. And it is a fact that you know, based on the type of neighbourhood that you stay in, the premium that you pay for certain basic services will be different, right? This sort of a very natural, organic sort of development is what leads to segregation, and I would say this is perhaps by spatial segregation, mostly based on income. It is somewhat inevitable in the development trajectory of any country, right? That said, I think the 15-minute neighbourhood concept actually targets this problem head on, because it does not speak for or against segregation. What it says is all neighbourhoods in a city should have availability and accessibility to good quality amenities within a 15-minute walking or cycling distance. It’s what we at Jana Urban Space, call place-based development, where you pick a neighbourhood, you assess its current situation with respect to access to basic amenities and services. So we have framed this AAQ framework, the availability, accessibility and quality framework, where you’re looking at what essential basic services are available, how good is your accessibility to those services? For example, if you have a park every person is entitled and should have access to nine square metres of open space, right as per WHO standards. So it’s not just whether the park is available in your vicinity within a 15 minute walking distance, right? But what is, how accessible is that park? Are you able to walk up to it? Are you able to cycle up to it? Is the infrastructure that is leading up to the road good? Is the park open at viable hours of the day, so things like that, right? Access has like how safe it is for you to travel there, things like that. And then the quality of the infrastructure in itself, how good is the quality of the public space of the park. Something that struck us as very odd is, if you look at public parks in India, and if you look at children’s parks in India, almost all the parks have play infrastructure for like, up to 10 years of age. If you look, there is no infrastructure for teenagers to play in public parks. It’s always the slides and the swings. And you know, that’s not what teenagers need and then you will see teenagers, playing on the streets where it is extremely unsafe for them to play. Road safety being another part of the discussion, right? So, it’s about those things that you assess the quality, accessibility and quality of basic services and amenities, right? And then you decide that, what does that particular neighbourhood need? So, a low income neighbourhood might need completely, completely different amenities from what a middle income or a high income or a mixed income neighbourhood might need, right? And then you provide that specific neighbourhood with that sort of development. So essentially, I feel like the idea, like, when all neighbourhoods in a city become 15 minutes, you are automatically enabling socio-economic inclusion. Because if I were to go to an urban poor or a low-income settlement and like, let’s say one, let’s say one neighbourhood in the city of Pune, where I stay is like, it’s just low income, it’s not even mixed income, right? And I see that they do not have any parks or recreation and infrastructure. They do not have any open spaces. My first point of advocacy would be for them to have an open space. My first point of advocacy and first point of development would be to say that you need to have better access. You need to have a well-designed road that leads to a park where children can go, where women can go in the evenings, where men can go, where all sorts of old people can go and walk. So that is, that is what the idea of place-based development and 15-minute neighbourhood, the way we envision is right. It’s not to say that all neighbourhoods have to have the same form of development. You assess the need, and then you decide what that neighbourhood needs, and then you do what needs to be done to make sure that the quality of life of citizens in that particular neighbourhood is made better. Yeah, also just one more point on, since we are speaking about 15-minute neighbourhoods, one point that I want to make is, like you pointed out, this is about essential services, right? So, there’s also the idea that there are services and amenities that you need within 15-minute walking and cycling, then there are services and amenities you will need, maybe not in 15 we walk in and say, it can be 30 minutes by public transport. It can be 60 minutes by public transport. Public transport, like an airport or a railway station in 30 minutes. So, the way we plan and develop also needs to be centred around those things. Not everybody has to live within very close proximity to an airport or a railway station, but you need public transport that can lead you to that. What you need is access to a public transport node within 15 minutes of walking and cycling. So, I think that is a way of layer thinking that I think already exists, but it also needs to be implemented better. And essentially, yeah, that’s where the idea of a 15-minute neighbourhood comes in.
Shantha Venugopal:
I think you actually addressed a lot of what I think I’ve seen in terms of criticism of the concept is usually that it implies that some neighbourhoods will have an overall lower quality, and some neighbourhoods will have an overall higher quality. But I think this framing that you just provided actually really clears that up for me, because what you’re essentially saying is this is a way of coming up with localised, contextualised policy solutions. So, it’s more of a planning process than like an idealistic concept of the entire city turning into these perfect 15-minute bubbles, but more what that 15 minute radius needs, and then start there, and then, I’m guessing that means, after that neighbourhood gets a park, then you start thinking about the next biggest need and improving the quality of that service.
Surjyatapa Choudhury:
Yes, and this is where a large part of the citizen centric development also comes in, like you need to involve these people. You need to involve the people who are living there, to come up and tell that this is what I need, that maybe 70% of the people in that neighbourhood needs a daycare facility, because that is the work profile or socio-economic profile of that or of that particular neighbourhood, and maybe in some other neighbourhood, they just need, like a community centre. I’m just thinking off the top of my head, it could be some other completely different, like a healthcare facility.
Some of these facilities have to be there in every neighbourhood, we would say, but it’s not only about what has to be there. It’s also about, like, what has to be there in order of priority, right? So, what he said comes true there, that first we need this, and once we have this, then we can think of the other steps as and when it comes so that priority is not the same for every neighbourhood across India?
Shantha Venugopal:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think contextualising solutions is something that we end up working on quite a bit. Okay, so this next question is for Karthik, so obviously I’m going by area of expertise and the projects you’ve worked on. So what I’m most excited to ask you about is: with the strong push for electrifying urban mobility through electric vehicles and buses. How far do you think that can take us in terms of achieving a low carbon mobility future? To what extent can it help reduce overall transportation emissions?
Karthik Kuppu 27:34
Sure, so electric mobility is a very interesting one. Back in 2014, I remember a news article that came out saying that India got its first zero emission bus in Bangalore. I was very excited. I mean, back then, I was not in this space. I didn’t really understand what zero emission was. But as time progressed, the meaning of that zero emission, as we just lightly touched upon earlier, came out, right? So it’s zero emission, but in certain contexts only. So the zero emission refers to tailpipe emission, specifically, just clearing this up: Over the lifecycle of a vehicle, right? I’m sure a lot of you know, carbon is emitted for producing it, for operating it, and then towards the end of the life to potentially recycle or reuse it. When it comes to electric vehicles, right after, you know, the first few kilometres a person drives a bus or a car, the lifecycle emissions for that at that point is still higher than a traditional, you know, patrol or a diesel vehicle. Now this is something that most people don’t know about, and many times I have conversations with people who are not very familiar with this topic, and it’s interesting to see them change and say, oh my god, you know zero emission vehicles will be not, not entirely true. So when it comes to electric vehicles, a couple of things, right? So the crux of emissions for the electric vehicles come from the operating phase. So when you actually run it on the road, around 20,000 kilometres, it reaches parity with the patrol and diesel vehicle, and then it gets better over time. So when that happens, you see the real, real lever there is how the electricity is being produced, right? So are you producing it only through renewable sources? Is it a dirty source, like coal and all those kinds of things? If you look at India specifically, almost I think just over 50% of power being generated is through fossil fuels. So at this point, if you plug in your electric vehicle, it’s not entirely clear the way it’s. Charging. However, you know, coming out of just this electricity debate, electric vehicles do provide a lower carbon source than a low carbon mode of transport than the traditional vehicle. So definitely, you know, a step in the right direction. However, in the large scheme of things, like, I think, Anna as well, mentioned, the real formula is the modal shift. So if we think about modal shift to public transport, the best way to incorporate electric mobility would be to, you know, fund electric vehicles in public transport like buses and trams and all those things. So, when it comes to electric vehicles towards the low carbon modes of transport, that’s the way to go. And I feel that when you talk about, you know, charging infrastructure and all those things that enable it. It definitely makes sense, like the best buses in Mumbai are doing, to kind of move all the charging towards renewable sources, potentially to solar panels or wind energy for that matter. So, yeah, when it comes to electric vehicles, I think it’s not a one shot solution. It’s probably an intermediate step in a series of steps toward Net Zero, low emission transport.
Shantha Venugopal 31:36
Yeah, I’ve been reading a lot more about how they’re trying to increase private electric vehicle ownership in India. And I often wonder if maybe the split towards that is too strong compared to the split towards public transport being renewable. We are moving in that direction. But I wonder if, in terms of nudges and behavioural shifts, there’s as much value in private vehicles being electric at the moment compared to improving public transport. But yeah, that’s super interesting, and I think a lot of people really don’t know this, this fact that electric vehicles are not zero emission so that’s always important to highlight. This next question I have is for Anna, across the world, getting people to consistently adopt public transport is a challenge. So from a behavioural perspective, what are some of the key barriers that you’ve noticed deter people from using public transport the most?
Anna Walter-Dox 32:29
Yeah, I mean, the simple answer is, infrastructure, right? If we don’t have the infrastructure for public transport, people are not going to engage in that behaviour. They won’t use it. But even in countries like Austria and Germany, where I grew up, we have quite a decent infrastructure for sustainable modes of transport, and many people still prefer cars. So this already indicates that infrastructure isn’t the only answer, and there are some more behavioural barriers to it. I would say, from my perspective, there are three main barriers, the first one being ease. So people often perceive that it’s not easy to engage in sustainable transport. It’s cited as one of the hardest decisions to make to live car free, which I find is a bit hilarious, but it’s one of the highest impact decisions that you can make to reduce your carbon emissions. But people find it very hard, and it does require breaking with habits, and it does require to maybe learn how to safely ride a bike or to navigate, you know, roads as a pedestrian. So there’s a certain skill set that you would also have to acquire. Um, the second thing is, besides easiness, is attractiveness. So many people would say it’s unattractive to your sustainable mobility. If you have to squeeze into, you know, a metro with many people, you arrive sweaty, you don’t know if it’s reliable. In contrast, driving with a private vehicle seems so comfortable, it seems to give you personal space. And as Kartik mentioned earlier, it does convey a certain status. And on that note, I want to say that it doesn’t have to be like that. In Germany, where I grew up, the car lobby is very strong. Everyone loves cars, and you should have two or three cars in front of your house to show all your neighbors how great of a person you are and so on, and convey your status. But in France, where my partner comes from, the car industry isn’t as strong, and so people really don’t care so much about cars. They have small cars. It’s not so much of a status symbol, which also shows you that it doesn’t have to be like that. So besides easiness and attractiveness, a third thing I think that Surjyatapa, you already touched a bit upon when you were talking about the parks, is social aspects. So we know that people often underestimate the support that there is for low carbon mobility or also low carbon policies, it’s called pluralistic ignorance. And I want to give you an example. I went to this sustainable mobility conference in Austria, and I went by bike, so I had my helmet, and I looked around and no one else had a helmet. And I thought, well, that’s odd. We’re talking about sustainable mobility here. I felt so isolated. I felt like I’m the only one here fighting for this but when preparing for this talk, I reflected upon it, and I thought, well, maybe they came by public transport so they wouldn’t need a helmet, but initially you’re just feeling like you’re on your own in this in this challenge, in this endeavour, and so making it a social thing would be also really important as well.
Shantha Venugopal35:40
Yeah, as you were mentioning comfort in travelling alone in your car. I was thinking about how people would prefer to be alone on their commute than to be with other people, which maybe wasn’t – I mean, I don’t want to speak for people before my time – but I don’t think that was always true, so that’s definitely something that hopefully behavioural shifts will change over time. But yeah, it’s very interesting to hear about that, especially the differences between France and Germany. Do you feel that French public transport has compensated enough for the lack of private vehicle ownership? Just as a side question that I didn’t plan on asking?
Anna Walter-Dox 36:18
I don’t have numbers. But the thing is, private vehicle ownership is still very high in France. It’s just that the cars themselves are smaller and they look less fancy, and people care less about them, and they often have people who use cars or so on. I think this is the major difference. I think the modal split isn’t so different, unfortunately, between those two countries.
Surjyatapa Choudhury 36:42
Can I ask a question here?
Shantha Venugopal 36:44
Please do.
Surjyatapa Choudhury 36:46
What about safety? Is that a significant factor behind why people might not be willing to use public transport?
Anna Walter-Dox 37:00
Yeah, it definitely is. I mean, if we’re looking at the context of India or developing countries, I would say safety is an issue. But then again, if we look at objective safety, like in Austria, where I live in Vienna, in the city, many people are using public transport, and it’s across all age ranges, even young school kids are going unobserved to school with the metro and so on. So safety is not the only answer, but definitely it’s really important, and it’s not just about objective safety. So of course, you can install cameras and so on, but it’s also about perceived safety, and that comes more by having people walk around in safety vests, by feeling not alone on the platform and so on. So it’s not just objective measures of whether you have a button where you could click and call someone for help. It’s also about how it feels.
Karthik Kuppu 37:54
Just to add to that, one of the most interesting things I found, which I personally experienced on the Mumbai local is that, you know people who commute, they find a group within the compartments. They know exactly where they need to be situated in the train. And they do like prayers, they sing songs and everything. And I’ve spoken to some of them. It’s very interesting to see that that specific activity incentivizes them to go to a certain train, certain carriage, take a certain type of transport, even. I mean Mumbai, maybe not so, but potentially in other cities, so that entire aspect of you being able to do another activity while travelling, maybe even catching up on sleep, right? Is something that’s significant that public transport offers, which private transport does not offer. I mean, you have to sit there and stare at the road for an hour driving, right?
Shantha Venugopal 38:57
Not to, not to take away from the seriousness of it. But I believe it’s actually, I think it’s a Japanese TV show where children you follow like children who are so young, like below the age of 10, as they navigate their city by themselves, using the public transport, going to get groceries and all of that, because culturally independence is focused on a lot, so they’re encouraged to do that. And because the culture does that, your kind of all in it together. You all have to protect all the kids, your kids, their kids, everyone’s kids. So public transport might even be extra safe compared to, say, cycling, which isn’t public transport, but you’re doing it alone.
So yeah, that’s a very interesting cultural aspect of these behaviour shifts. I’m going to quickly jump into the next question. I’ll again start with Surjyatapa for this one.
Shantha Venugopal (40:29)
So Jana urban mobility has been working on low carbon mobility solutions for many years, from all the 15 minute city guidelines to the complete streets framework in Bangalore. What are some of the key challenges in implementing these solutions, and what do you think can be done to address them?
Surjyatapa Choudhury
That’s a big question. I will try to structure it in sort of like three key areas that we anyway work in, but starting from policy, I think the biggest challenge is the change in mindset and vision for decision makers and bureaucrats who actually enable this sort of infrastructure development, right? Because public space development is whole and sole in the hands of public authorities. In very limited cases do we have PPP partnerships. But even then, it is public land, so we need their permission to go ahead to even do any sort of intervention, right? So the first is always the mindset, change the vision, change with these decision makers, right? And here it’s like, it’s a simple question that we have always been asking. It’s like, what is the end goal? Do you want to transport people and goods from A to B, or do you want to transport cars from A to B. It’s something as simple as that, like, what is the what is it that you’re trying to do right? Roads carry people, good services, but to be honest, the challenges go beyond that. Like, if you look at roads, urban roads, they carry people. They carry goods, services, and utilities from the city, storm water, sewage, water supply, gas, electric conduits, everything is going either above or underneath the road, right? So I think a lot of decision makers, even experts, even experts and consumers, fail to look at this holistic perspective. So when you actually go in and try to target this and present this scenario, that when you build a road, you also need to build what is going subsurface, right? Like the utility chamber, chambers that, because, if you look in India, the reason we have this, like cyclical, uh, notion of like digging re-digging roads every monsoon, everywhere across the country, you will see all these workers, just like digging up the road, fixing some sewer line, fixing some electric line, cleaning the stormwater drains. The problem is that, because you have these utilities somewhere under the road, carriageway designed, in a very sort of formalised way of road design and building, you have the utilities shifted underneath the footpath, and you have manholes at, let’s say, 100-200 metres based on the need for cleaning, etc, need for accessing those services. That way, you are not disturbing pedestrian traffic. You’re not disturbing cycle traffic. You’re not disturbing the cars and the other motorised transport, right? There is a system to it that is that people and, most importantly, decision makers and bureaucrats do not understand and see. Good news is that this is something that is changing a little bit. I mean, people are increasingly given the, you know, given the increased extreme weather events across the country, the amount of like urban floods that we are looking at, which is completely development driven, right? It’s because your cities are not able to absorb the storm water at source, or not able to channelize and channelize that stormwater. Now, people are now increasingly starting to understand that, yes, this also needs to be designed when we design a road. So one is equitable distribution of road space, then all these utilities, etc. So one of the biggest changes, of course, us the mindset part again. The second part is in creating mandates, so we can have as many frameworks, guidelines, etc, developed as humanly possible by policy experts, etc. But if these are not mandated across state or at the Union level, or even at a city level, this will never be implemented. Because the people who are implementing public infrastructure are the people who are actually going down to the ground and building this infrastructure – the municipal engineers and contractors, right? We are the designers, but we are actually not the ones who are actually going on the road and building it. So unless these things have been mandated, this can’t be implemented at scale. That’s another thing. So just to give you a little bit of an example here, something that we have been working on in general at Jana Urban Space is advocating and building an alternate schedule of rates. So a lot of you might be aware a schedule of rates is a rate document that contractors look at when they have to build, put the quotations for a bid, right so they want to build a certain road, they will look at the materials that are available for developing the carriageway, for developing the footpath, for the medians, all the design elements. And they will look at what is already available in that schedule of rate documents. And based on that, they will give the quotations. And when they actually go in to build, like when they win the bid and go to actually implement that, they are going to use the same materials, because that’s what they have quoted on. So unless you have alternate materials, sustainable building materials, sustainable construction techniques actually institutionalised in that document – and this document is prepared by the central public works department and then adopted, like adapted in a localised context by different states. So you have the state PWDs that make their own versions of it based on their labour charges, their machinery charges, transportation cost, etc. So like context specific changes right now to get into too much technicalities in it, but this is a very important document that not a people realize needs to change, right?
There are a gazillion sustainable materials out there. In India, manufacturers are manufacturing alternate sustainable green materials, green from the source, right? So using less energy during manufacturing, using less energy for transportation, during construction, during operation, maintenance and during the end life cycle, as Karthik had mentioned earlier, right? So there are materials existing out there, but if this is not institutionalized in that document, no contractor is going to use it, because nobody is going to do this work. Sit and look at okay, this is a material. Let me get vendor quotations from five different vendors. Let me first find those vendors. Somebody has to do this work, and then it has to be institutionalised, and then that is how you drive this sort of system change, right? So advocacy in itself, advocacy is a big step in the game, and it is very important for us to do it and do it aggressively, unless we get what we want. But we also look at need to look at this bits and pieces in the implementation mechanisms of this, regulations, policies, etc., and identify that, okay, this needs to change, and this is how I change it. So instead of just doing it downstream, you need to look at what part of the process needs to be changed at which node we need to create this change, and then. And so this is where mandates, etc., come in. The second big part is professional development.
Shantha Venugopal:
Sorry to cut you off, I have to add that we don’t have quite enough time. So I’ll just ask you to summarise the last two points, just so I can get to the other panellists’ questions.
Surjyatapa Choudhury
I’ll just be quick professional development. So people who are actually building things on ground, there has to be continuous skill based development for them. There has to be interagency coordination between different utility departments, land departments, different state departments, ministries, etc. And the final part is, again, going back. This is very important, but I’ll not spend too much time on it is, is behaviour change and acceptance, right? So something we saw in Tender SURE roads people are bound to be affected by this sort of public infrastructure development, right? So, because their day to day life is getting affected, once they actually see the value that it brings, they themselves become champions to this thing. So yeah, quick win projects, Lighthouse projects, very necessary to sort of create this sort of mindset shift in delivering what we need to deliver. Yeah, I’ll stop here. Thanks.
Shantha Venugopal (47:37)
My next question is for Karthik, what would you say the role of data and tech or technology, is in driving low carbon mobility. And if you could highlight some key examples of how technology is creating more efficient and sustainable transport systems in cities around the world, given your experience
Karthik Kuppu 48:34
I think when it comes to technology, a kind of group of fields that I’ve been working on is called CASE mobility. So it encompasses Connected, Autonomous, Shared and Electric vehicle modes, as we already discussed, electric vehicles probably a step in the process towards low carbon mobility. However, probably not the ultimate goal, but when we look at other technologies out there that’s helping us drive this transition, an interesting one is actually shared mobility, and within that comes things like car share, micro mobility modes, and also something that many of you probably know, called mobility as a service. And this is a very interesting one, because it combines a couple of things like data technology, and since almost everyone has a phone, it is very easily accessible. So one of the interesting applications here is, I think we already spoke about how we need to push people towards making that modal shift, going to public transport, taking more non-motorised mobility. Right in that respect, one of the key aspects is to make that transition easier. So if someone wants to go from point A to point B. If they take a car, it would typically be door to door. However, when it comes to public transport, you have to walk to a bus stop, take a bus, then maybe take a bike share to get to a final destination. And typically, one of the biggest barriers for that is you have to go through a mobile app, book a bike share, then, you know, potentially buy a ticket on the bus, and then potentially figure out, okay, is there a way I can get to my final destination without walking? Is there some scooter or something? There are certain countries that have done a very good job in integrating all of that. Basically, you put in your origin destination, and you get a single ticket that combines all modes, and you don’t even have to pay a ticket because you have a yearly pass. So that makes your life really easy. In India, the first step toward that, I know that there are a couple of startups like Chalo, which is doing a good job. They have around 50 cities. I think in India, you can purchase tickets in any one of the cities, so that’s the kind of ease of integration I’m talking about when it comes to shared mobility., With electric mobility. One of the interesting things is, AI is a buzzword nowadays, but data, when it comes to charging, has been used in many places outside India to kind of optimise the consumption of electricity and also find where the electric charging stations need to be placed. And I think when it comes to India, which is still kind of young and early in the EV transition. This is something that can help a lot, you know, kind of drive that so we can move forward. And then some examples, I think so. In the interest of time, I probably highlight one good example here, which is, I recently spoke to the Finnish government, and they’re creating this multimodal system. I think they’ve already implemented a lot of it, like I said, where you have one ticket for, you know, going from point A to B, and they’ve also included an international destination in Estonia. I feel it is very interesting. India has a couple of their own, you know, very friendly neighbours. And I feel like, if you really want to create a holistic system though, even the short distances and long distances, are something that could be explored over here.
Shantha Venugopal 52:42
Yeah, that sounds really wonderful. And honestly, as an Indian citizen, I would really like that as well. And our metro system already does sort of, it’s starting to use those sorts of apps and things. So I can see those things making a real difference already. For Anna, lucky for me, and in the interest of time, the question I had prepared is very similar to one that the audience asked. So I’m going to read mine and then tack on the specifics from the audience. So drawing on the work you’ve done with the London tube, as well as the work you’re doing in Austria, what are some of the effective behavioural strategies that cities and transit agencies can implement to improve public transport adoption and retention. And do you think there are any lessons for cities in the Global South? (which hopefully covers the question from the chat.)
Anna Walter-Dox 53:29
Yeah, thanks for the question. I do want to mention that I didn’t work for London tube, though, so I don’t want to take credit for that. And I also want to thank my friend Jasper Singh from Gezira, who helped me contextualise the thoughts I have on best practices and so on, and transferring them to cities in the Global South. I want to come back to the three barriers that I talked about, namely ease, attractiveness and social aspects. Easiness, so increasing easiness is especially important for the most vulnerable groups. Low Carbon mobility should be a no brainer. It shouldn’t put people into a financial dilemma. We’ve already talked about very diverse needs and making it a safe endeavour for everyone. And I think what Karthik said about the multimodal apps was really interesting. And I want to mention a best practice from Austria, where, when you want to use the train, there’s multiple tickets, and I mean, it’s too much cognitively to process what ticket is optimal for you to take. And so what they did is they partnered with a startup from Switzerland, who were basically providing this app where you can just check in and check out. And so you check in, you go on Train A, then you take bus B, and then you take tram C, and whatever, and you check out. And the system of them is just calculating within a certain amount of time whatever ticket would be cheapest for you. So if you take a lot of trips during the 24 hours for example, then you get 24 hour tickets. If you take only a few trips, then it would charge you for a single ride. And I think making things easy for people is one key topic and best practice, the second one attractiveness. So making sustainable transport models more attractive, this is especially important, I think, for working professionals and also wealthy individuals who contribute disproportionately to the emissions. And here, Surjytapaa had really interesting points that she mentioned, I think, where you said you need to do quick run projects. And I want to highlight that and say from a variable perspective, also, if you are coming up with new ideas, for example, you want to have a car through something. You’re competing with systems and policies that have been implemented for ages already. And you’re competing with an idea with just words, and maybe you have a fancy slide set. So what you need to do is to run pilots. You need to make people experience the thing, see how they feel about it, and then talk to them and evaluate whether it is feasible, because otherwise you can never win in this kind of comparison game with your new ideas. So really run pilots, implement things. We have the Supergrätzl in Vienna, where we shut off certain areas to cars. We do silent disco there or so. And before, people are always upset, but then when they’ve tried it out, they kind of like it. So really use the psychological factors and the knowledge to get people’s buy in. And another part of attractiveness is also to use the right kind of framing. So with sustainability, you’re not going to get the masses anymore. Here in Austria, at least, it’s the case that if you want to be green or behave green, these people have already changed their behaviours, but we want to help the masses to engage in low carbon mobility and Kartik, you mentioned these commuter cycles, for example, in Mumbai, this is the exact thing. So being social is a benefit that you don’t have as much in a private vehicle as you can have it in public transport. Sell that or maybe that you can utilise your time. We’ve run interviews with people, and they said they like trains because they don’t have to drive so it’s comfortable. But they can also utilise their time. What we’re trying now is to communicate, oh, it’s so sustainable to go on holiday by train. But instead people care about, oh I can work on the train or oh, I can play games with my friends on the train. We have to communicate the things and the dimensions that people care about and that we can compete on, rather than trying to compete in dimensions like timing or time efficiency that we can’t win with public transport. On social aspects, role models are super important. So in Austria, the President is often seen right in the metro. It fits a bit to what you said in the beginning with the Bogota mayor’s quote. If you see the people that citizens look up to riding in public transport, this can be really inspiring, so we need these kinds of role models. And more importantly, also, I talked about habit changes in the beginning, so it’s very hard to change habits unless you have a window of opportunity. One window of opportunity is when people’s lives change. So for us, it’s often when people are turning 18, they often move out and so on, and so in Austria, we give everyone with the age of 18 a one year free public transport tickets, which is financially good thing, but also it establishes a habit at a time when habits can easily be established. So timing of interventions is another important fact. And to talk a bit about partnerships and technological solutions as well, my personal opinion is that, as Karthik said, technological solutions alone won’t suffice. They won’t help. I mean, we need to actively shape a human centred transition, and I do think that partnerships between public and private, you know, companies have data. They want to see where their services can sell. Policy makers provide the vision, they provide the regulations, the incentives and so on. Urban designers can implement this. And last but not least, the users, which need to be in the centre of all of this. If you make them come together, then we can have the systemic redesign. If you only have the silos and everyone works for themselves, you’re only optimising locally. You won’t have systematic change. And now, as I work in innovation, we often talk about ideas that scale, and I think that’s even more important in the Global South, given the population growth, need ideas that scare
Shantha Venugopal 59:45
Absolutely. Thank you for that. I actually think you have given me a kind of segue, I’m going to use this if you all have another five minutes to stay on. I can keep you all here. But the one of the questions that I think is related to what you just answered is for the question seems to be both for you, Anna and for Surjytapa as well. There are a lot of public transport vehicles in India that are not very well maintained. For example, old vehicles, vehicles without PUC that release a lot of smoke, unhygienic interiors. With all of these factors, behavioural shifts also become a little difficult. How can the public take an active stance to advocate for these changes? In case you have a response to that, though, I know as people who are working on these issues, that’s what we’re trying to design, is as ways for them to be actively involved in those policies. But if you’ve heard of anything successful, we can maybe highlight that here.
Anna Walter-Dox 1:00:43
I can only speak about the Austrian context, because I don’t know how it is organised in India, but we do have a lot of citizen initiatives. So it’s not party or governmental related, but it’s really citizens getting together in local groups and organising themselves and advocating for certain kinds of initiatives that they want to happen. I’m not sure if this really works for such a large scale infrastructural problem as non maintained public transport. So I do think you need to basically intervene on all layers. You need to have these initiatives. You need to vote for the governments or the elect parties or people in positions of power that you think can change it. You need to advocate very strongly in the media and so on. So really give it all you got, basically, to try to shift the norm towards change becoming inevitable, also in this infrastructural manner.
Surjyatapa Choudhury 1:01:46
It’s definitely something that’s difficult, and that’s something that that advocacy around this has been there for, for a significant amount of time. But like I said, changes, like we all think change is a little slow. But one thing, and this I speak in the context of Bangalore, because that’s where we are headquartered, and I have most knowledge about that particular place, is there a lot of like citizen groups and civic groups that sort of formalise, like Anna said, they formalise, and then once you have, once you have collected significant amount of support for that, you can actually approach your local leaders, because that’s a first step for you to do. So in the case of Bangalore, you have Ward councillors and your local sort of MLAs, etc. I think people usually, typically go to the ward councillors and then MLAs. And this also applies, I’m from Guwahati., I know it applies to Guwahati. I don’t know whether it applies to every city. Unfortunately, I do not work very strongly in citizen participation, but I do know that the first step is, if you have a problem, and if you do not already have a formalised system of engagement with your local leaders, then there are citizen groups, etc. Or at least you can form a citizen group and then approach, once you have a significant amount of strength, and you can approach your local leaders, and that is one of the first steps of advocacy that you can take as and when your size increases. I think you can take it up in the media. You can take it up in bigger platforms, and that that pushes, puts enough and because this is the beauty of a democracy, I feel like it puts enough pressure on your local leadership to act to those particular changes, and this is why we have, we vote for our constituent, MLAs, et cetera, not to get into different discussion on together. But I think that’s a very good way, and that’s a very foolproof way to sort of start in this and then see where it takes you on a bigger stage.
Shantha Venugopal
Thank you all so much in the interest of time, and also because the final question is very specific to Panjim, which is one of PULL’s project cities. So I’m not entirely sure I can make you all answer the question. I will wrap this up with just a quick summary of what all we’ve discussed today and just some of the key highlights. First of all, thank you all so much for speaking with me today. I’ve heard so much new information, and I’m really excited to have had this conversation. So thank you. But yeah, just to pull out some of the highlights, we’ve heard so much from you, Anna, about how behaviour shifts and normative shifts are very necessary, about the need for just and fair transitions, especially in developing countries. And from all of your research that you’ve done, both in Austria and abroad in general, I think we’ve learned a lot from that and from Surjyatapa, I think the localised and contextualised solutioning that you’ve talked about has been really helpful, especially in understanding some of the behavioural shift suggestions that Anna was talking about. So that was really interesting, especially how 15-minute cities work, and the framework of that, and I think the most important part, which is implementation at a local scale in India, has its own barriers and its own successes that require specific focus and study to solve those problems. And then, of course, from Karthik, everything I’ve learned about urban mobility, and case mobility especially, was extremely interesting, and I think we’re on that path. So I have a lot of hope as a young Indian citizen that all of these things will actually come to fruition eventually. So yeah, thank you all so much. And with that, I’ll wrap this up for our participants. Please stay tuned to our website and our social media, because we’ll be posting a summary of this, and please share it with anyone you think would be interested. Thank you all for taking out the time.
