Lesson planning
THE Washington -based International Institute for Energy Conservation has recently compiled a report, Modeling Urban Transportation Emissions and Energy Use - Lessons for the Developing World. The report concludes that traffic modelling advances and challenging planning practices lay in technological evolutions like powerful low-cost microcomputers that would enable better systems analysis and more accurate prediction of air pollutibn emissions and energy consumption.
"Additional challenges to the traditional transportation planning Process in the South stem from the booming growth in automobile ownership in developing countries and the rapid and" highly unpre8ictable forms of urban' growth and outgrowth," the report notes.
This fact is particularly true for India, whose output of motor cars registered an increase of no less than 32.5 per cent within an 11 month period till February 1996. Maruti Udyog has announced a turnover rise of 52 per cent. The company has the target to make 3.2 lakh cars in 1996, which is an increase of 16 per cent from the previous year.
The report adds that this spurt in private ownership could be balanced by a rational land use policy. It cites one of the most successful such plans which was used at Sao Paulo in Brazil, where it was divided into five parts, four of them being land use plans and the Fifth, a transport model with travel demand projects and transport networks.
Quoting C J Khisty's Transportation in Developing Countries: Obvious Problems, Possible Solutions, 1993, the ieport impresses upon the fact that developing countries needed to increase their ability to supply and manage infrastructure by 75 per cent simply to mainitain the present status quo.
"Estimates suggest that Bangkok needed us $15 billion in planned transport investments over 15 years, which would speed up snarled traffic by a mere one kilometre per hour. Problems result from a clash of two cultures; that of the West epitomised by technological advances and the use of motorised transport, and traditional technologies and people-based transport such as walking and bicycling."
There exists a large knowledge gap in most of the developing world, with effective modelling being largely ignored till cities reach middle income status. Even this, the report notes, is often discounted since traffic congestion and air pollution are percieved as inevitable byproducts of economic growth.
Once again, this situation is all too apparent in the Indian context, where automobilisation has been undesirable from the economic and ecological standpoint. According to IT B Mathur of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, "While at the present moment the country spends 0.50 paisa on every Re 1.00 earned in foreign exchange on the import of crude oil, estimates have it that this expense would draw even by the turn of the century."
The report also points out that unavailable or incorrect data has been found to hinder calibration and validation of travel demand models. Even in those developing countries where it was attempted (for instance in Chile during the period 1990-91), the time taken for data collection and collation was much more than that would be required in the case of a developed country.
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