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Commercial initiative has yielded a revolution in service quality and cost in telecommunications and energy sectors. With such a heavy involvement of private suppliers of service in urban transport, it eludes many an expert, why it has failed so badly to meet the aspirations of customers, producers and market makers alike.

It also seems paradoxical that such disparity should exist in a sector which has such an obvious excess of demand over supply, and which has witnessed rapid advances in automobile and transportation technologies with more powerful engines and electronic and software control that are designed for super fast speeds as the vehicles exhibit in test conditions and on racing tracks. On the road though, the traffic speed in most urban areas has been dramatically similar to what existed at the times when horse and carriage was the fastest means of travel.

Urban transport falters on other counts as well. It is polluting, unsafe, costly, inaccessible and inequitable. Worse still, short term, localized improvements are often out of concert with a systemic approach towards a wider and sustainable development. Few would disagree that the need of the hour is a radical change in our deeper assumptions, beliefs and motivations that drive the current urban transport system, on the need to reinvent the wheel.

Across cities around the world the familiar world of urban transport presents a grim scenario. The frames may vary amongst cities, but the underlying assumptions that govern the failed familiar world are the same. See Box 1: The Familiar World of Urban Transport.

Box I: The Familiar World of Urban Transport “The frames for Mumbai, for instance, bring images of cavalcade of motor vehicles caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic congestion. discomforted and vulnerable pedestrian, raging drivers, dug up roads, dusty roads, waterlogged roads; roads under perpetual repairs; roads encroached upon by vendors and slums; flyovers which are left incomplete for several years further eating up road space; overcrowded buses; long queues on bus stops along with empty seats on air conditioned cars, with rolled up windows and dented bodies. Closer still, images occur of street children knocking on the windows of the air-conditioned cars. The knocks have been getting harder on the ear together with honking cars to shoo them off and other vehicles to get off the road too. What meet the eyes (and enters the lungs) outside in the “familiar world” are vehicular fumes (dense due to poor fuel quality and localised in traffic jams).” Pull down the frames of Mumbai and roll over London. The problem is not so severe, but bad enough to register in the minds of most Londoners – citizens and businesses – as first among the issues facing the future of the city. “During the morning peak in Central London, Average traffic speeds (including time spent in queues) are around 16 kmph during the working day. The total number of cars and commercial vehicles (50,000 vehicles per hour) entering or crossing Central London is equivalent to that carried by 25 or more busy motorway lanes. In the rest of Inner London, traffic on main roads moves at around 19kmph during the morning and evening peak periods and at about 24kmph between these peak periods. Narrow lanes and turning roads are crammed to the brim with cars. To sit in gridlock at an intersection for ten minutes waiting for more than one change of lights before your turn comes, as many Londoners do, is indeed a harrowing experience.” Move over to Baltimore, Detroit and Cleveland in the United States, for a country which is in the eye of a storm for its antics in the Middle East to suit its oil interests, the images are very different, but they are linked to problems elsewhere. A recent editorial cartoon in the Baltimore Sun shows a shopper's eyes popping at the prospect of $1.65-per-gallon gasoline, while he's lugging such groceries as $9.87-a-gallon beer, $48-a-gallon maple syrup, and $4.52-a-gallon spring water. Urban sprawl, in the meanwhile, has been spreading, like some incredibly tenacious disease, paradoxically in cities that are losing population. Metropolitan Detroit lost 8 percent of its population and grew 35 percent in land area in the last twenty years. Cleveland lost 11 percent of its population and grew 38 percent in land area. There you have shrinkage and sprawl. Such unabated growth waste resources or land unnecessarily, or cause excessive traffic congestion. Whetting a seemingly insatiable appetite for automobiles, Sport-utility vehicles (SUVs), and the category they occupy, light-duty trucks, have overtaken cars in the US marketplace. Huge eight-passenger SUVs are part of the morning commute, many with solo drivers."

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