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Cars, cars and more cars… Small and big; fancy and austere; manufactured for the Indian public or customised exclusively for the rich and the famous. Have you noticed how the entire nation has been on the ‘auto-talk mode’, ever since the new year set in? Even as automobile companies are vying with each other to roll out fresh models to tempt consumers; auto experts are filling newspaper columns and prime-time television space with glowing predictions of how the ‘great Indian dream’ – of a very sizeable section of the country’s humungous population owning cars – is about to come true. 
So, Gobar Times decided to do a reality check. If a few million more cars are added to the Indian roads in the coming years – how will it affect us, the people living in this country? Well, what we found is not exactly a ‘dream come true’ situation. In fact, it is more like a nightmare... We found out that these alluring automobiles will jostle for the limited space on our limited roads. Air quality will only get worse, energy use will go up, and instead of moving ahead, people will actually grind to a stop due to congestion.
PEAK HOUR TRAFFIC scenario in any Asian city is a cartoonist’s delight. Hassled motorists, frayed tempers, crammed buses, trams and metros – a chaos complete with cars, two-wheelers and vans, jeeps, crawling through a choking haze of pollution. The dream of mobility woven around a snazzy car has turned into a nightmare of immobility. During the last decade (1996-2006), while the total road length in Delhi has increased by about 20 per cent, cars have increased by 132 per cent...
A recent survey finds that people lose 2.5 hours every day to reach their destination. Imagine the waste! Current estimates already suggest that congestion cost can be as high as Rs 3,000-4,000 crore per year in the city.This is bound to get worse, as roads and flyovers fail to keep pace with the growing numbers. Road speed in Delhi, as in Mumbai and Bangalore, has actually gone down – not up – in spite of increased investments in road widening and flyovers. Now here is another interesting piece of information. While there has been a phenomenal growth of private vehicles in
our cities, large numbers of people – an estimated 60 per cent and above – still travel by bus or bicycle or walk to work. Share of buses in the total fleet in India has dwindled from 11 per cent in the 1950s to 1.1 per cent today. This is visible in the use of road space. In Delhi, personal vehicles – cars and two-wheeler – use up more than 75 per cent of the road space but meet only 20 per cent of the commuting demand. But buses that use less than 5 per cent of the road space, meet more than 60 per cent of the travel demand.
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