K: What do you do?

F: I get up in the morning, I fight traffic on my way to office, I sit at a desk, I again fight traffic on my way home.….. and then I pay taxes.

Kevin’s family, as you well know, are a typical American suburban family in the 1970s, about 30 years ago. From Kevin’s father’s words you can tell that the journey to and from office, by car, occupies a substantial part of his daily routine. Compare this to the almost daily complaints you hear at dinner about the traffic condition that your dads and moms face everyday on the roads. You, too, perhaps have got stuck sometime in heavily congested roads at some point of time and have been irritated by the smoke and noise and heat and confusion....

Vehicles today seem to be a necessary part of life. Try imagining life without one. The mind boggles. You don’t possibly see how life will be possible. Yet motorized vehicles are not very old, being very much a 20th century phenomenon. Shakespeare wouldn’t have recognised one, nor would Napoleon. In 1901 Mercedes-Benz estimated that the world would totally require just about a million cars (a figure reached in 1915).

Today there are about 450 million motor vehicles all over the world. This is less than the total non-motorised vehicles (cycles, rickshaws, etc), which number about 850 million. In fact, though we hardly realise it, most of the human transportation need is met by non-motorised vehicles and walking.

However, because vehicles, especially cars, are seen as far more attractive, and match a certain image of a comfortable, well-off lifestyle, they are increasingly popular. You must have seen ads on television which very consciously say that a person's dream in life is to own a car. In fact they also seem to suggest that without a car you've not made it in life. The car has become a symbol of the status a person has achieved. So even if he or she has no real need for a car, and most of the transport needs are being met by other means, the desire to have a car is nevertheless a constant one.

Have vehicles really made our lives easier? While we definitely travel much faster and more easily, too many automobiles are creating the opposite problem in cities, that of slowing us down. In a huge number of cities the average traffic speed is slower than that of a bicycle! Some problems are apparent — accidents, air pollution, traffic jams. But there are also some more important and dangerous, though less apparent and less easily understood ones like global warming, climatic change and lifestyle changes. Today we talk of megacities and the problems of distances, not realising it was cars that allowed this spread. Cars ‘freed’ people from the need to travel by public transport, allowing them to live further and further away from their workplaces. Over time the number of cars has increased so much that today the to-and-fro suburb-city travel is a time consuming and largely irritating
experience the world over, as those who stay in or travel to suburbs well know.

Though most vehicle owners and users are aware, at least to some extent, the dangers of over using vehicles,they actually do very little about it. For us Indians, who live in some of the most polluted and congested cities in the world, the awareness that the recent Supreme Court orders on emission norms have have not come a moment too soon.

Let’s zoom... er..sorry, mucho jam, crawl through this issue to see how cars have been affecting our lives in imaginable, and not-so-imaginable, ways.