letter from Leipzig

We will produce cars and you buy them however we will pedestrianise and make our cities bicycle oriented.

This is a loud and clear message I got from the German city of Leipzig where I had been on a fellowship programme on an international seminar on Sustainable mobility. This seminar was attended by delegates from Russia, Brazil, China, Mexico, Georgia, Ukraine, Peru, South Africa , Turkey .

The topic itself demonstrates the essence of mobility which is in sustainability and which cannot happen without working a holistic strategy for that Interestingly Leipzig is a large city with German standards and has a population of over 570 thousand (5 lac 70thousand) is the largest city in the federal state of Saxony in Germany. Known for one of its best urban mobility in the region the city has over 930 bicycles per 1000 population. The city boasts of a fairly long track of cyclists where the mobility is predominantly shared by the pedestrians and the cyclists. The impetus too from the planning perspective is to dissaude the cars and the car owners and instead focus on pedestrianising. It was nearly a shock for me when one of the architects of this programme and also the person responsible for transport in the city Torben Hierman lamented that they have a strategy now to reduce the lanes of the road from 6 to 4. This is something which will create lots of noise here in our country and cities but in Leipzig the mood was quite clear that by reducing the lanes the cars are being dissuaded from the streets and instead emphasis is laid on public transport , pedestrianisation and bicycles. The new lanes freed from the cars will be handed over to the pedestrians. Another interesting development and strategy that I came across is the dismantling of overhead bridges for pedestrians and ensuring that the pedestrians and also the cyclists have a fair deal on the road and should not be forced to climb an extra mile'.

While strategising over the speed limit in the city which is 30 km per hour the focus was also on to ensure that the creeking sound of the trams can also be reduced. The experts from the university of Leipzig explained how a research is being done by the department to ensure that there is a less than 50 decibel sound emanation from the traffic.

The amazing feature of planning could be witnessed with the complete integration of planning with transport and microzonation of each and every street. The buildings that appear as a block for the passage of the movement of the people of course the pedestrians and the cyclists had to leave a huge space open while ensuring mobility across so that the people do not have to walk a longer distance. Interestingly , the city planning is done by the city government with phenomenal empowerment. But this does not mean that the city council like we have the MC house here in India will decide it unilaterally according to the wish and fancies of individual leaders. The classic case of Gamada in Mohali and Dharamshalla in Himachal but there will be massive participation of stakeholders to ensure that the people are lent a voice. The city government will determine the complete movement of the transport which includes, trams, underground metros, buses , cycles and the pedestrians. Even the police works under the Mayor or as I would say the city government. There is answerability of one single agency and that is the Mayor and the council. Unlike in Shimla where the Municipal corporation decided to run electric vehicles but the state government (provincial in Europe) decided not to allow them to run and finally the matter had to be taken to the court and interestingly the court too asked for the locus standi of the Mayor, the plaintiff. This is nothing more than a ridicule! This is what we have to learn . To learn to work in integration, handing over the city affairs to the city government , empowereing them both politically and financially and not making them as muke adjuncts as done in Dharamshala etc . I dont know how much time will it take but this has to happen for the sake of our residents to provide them better transport and better liveability in the cities.

Who happens to be the driving force in the cities

Unlike our cities in India where the provincial or even the national governments decide the driving force or the steering of the cities movement , the cities in Europe and especially Leipzig has the task of steering the city to a fairly large extant. . In our country the national governments by using the most bogus and obnoxious method of building smart cities inter alia the crony capitalists and that too according to fudged data from many places as in Dharamshala are steering the cities and giving them impetus. Not realising that this will just be a tip of an iceberg and will not help. The whole jargon of sustainable transport without understanding the sustainability of the system will eventually lead to a disaster as Joan Closs from the UN Habitat often remarks , 'it is not about sustainability of the cities it is about sustainability of the system which is under severe threat '. Further as David Harvey put it while describing the ongoing crisis of capitalism as the crisis of the urban. Why I am mentioning it here is for the simple reason that one of the important lessons that we have to learn from these developed countries especially Germany which draws its infrastructure both from capitalism and socialism from the erstwhile GDR (Leipzig was part of GDR) is that the massive infrastructure developed in the past has been with the state support . So the lessons and the formidable one has and ought to be to ensure that the state i.e. the nation state comes forward and ensures proper allocation for the impinging infrastructure direly required for transport, sanitation etc. Else as Harvey points out the cities with just becoming centres of playing for the real estate cannot sustain and will eventually collapse. The real estate can speculate but cannot be the driving force for long in the cities and never for the transport.

Now I come to from where I started and that is 'we manufacture cars and you buy them'. This is exacty what we are witnessing in India. Leipzig that happens to be a centre for manufacturing Porshe and Mercedes Benz cars forces its residents to not to buy them by squeezing the road infrastructure but at the same time pedestrianising its city. However in India with phenomenal money being spent by the bank and even handed over to the state governments massive infrastructure is being developed to widen the roads from 4 lanes to 6 and to 8. Why . The answer is obvious the planning done at the behest of the national governments is to ensure that this money is used to widen the roads and to induce the people of our 'poor' country to buy more and more cars. In Himachal Pradesh (HP) under the state road project the World Bank is funding substantially to widen the roads in HP. It is a differnt matter that the Theog Hatkoti road is taking ages for the costruction with over a dozen apples harvest being spoiled because of the road construction. The point is and this is exactly what some months ago when I wrote to the World Bank chief in India that instead of widening these roads and further funding more than 20 national highways in the state why could they have not funded a rail project which would have been more sustainable and eco friendly meeting the urgent demand of climate change and mitigation. I really dont know when we will have this paradigm change that too from top bottom and I recall a question being asked by Mr Rana Gill one of the Indian origin family in Leipzig , will you be able to implement 50% of what you learnt here . And my answer was Gill sahib 50% is huge just remove the zero and if we are able to assimilate just 5% is more than enough given the macro governance environment here in our country.

Ciclovia!

Lastly I would also like to speak about it. Actually I was in this group of cyclists and as a task to perform we were asked to have a vision for the city of Leipzig of course not here in Shimla. And the vision is Ciclovia. What is Ciclovia. Ciclovia is a movement of pedestrians and the cyclists in the city of Bogota where nearly 120 km of the area on the street is completey blocked for the movement of cars and any other traffic. The only movement that is allowed is that of pedestrians and cyclists . The city of Leipzig intends to replicate that but for that massive participation of people is planned like meeting of stakeholders, meeting of potential opponents, school children, market people etc. Of course the movement is bottom top but at the same time the city council will have the final say which they were sure of getting an acceptance as building a critical mass will ensure for such success. Though I quite boastly told them we practice this in our city since long . On the Mall road and the bazars of Sanjaulli for a few hours in the morning and evening !

The city desperately demands for sustainable movement but which is on foot, cycles and public transport and least on cars !

Tikender Singh Panwar