Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
onwards there have been concerns around severe air pollution, largely arising from the polluting
vehicle fleet. Delhi was one of the world's most polluted cities in the 1990s, and in 1996 the
Centre for Science and Environment started a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court
of India, which ordered the conversion of Delhi's fleet of buses and taxis to be run on CNG
and banned the use of leaded petrol in 1998 (Roychowdhury et al., 2006). This was very
influential, and has led to a changed vehicle fleet and much improved local air quality.
Reducing CO2 emissions from transport has been much less of an issue for the city, but in
recent years there has been increasing interest in climate change as a societal issue to be
resolved. To an extent, though, CO2 emissions have largely arisen from Western industrialised
countries and this is certainly true when historical CO2 emissions are considered. Consequently,
it can be viewed as a Western (-induced) problem, and something that the developed countries
should address.
India is becoming a much more significant producer of CO2 emissions, with a rapid growth
in consumptive lifestyles. As a consequence, there has been a rapid rise in cross-sectoral and
transport CO2 emissions, but from a very low base in per capita terms. India is currently the
world's fourth largest fossil fuel CO2 emitting country in terms of aggregate emissions. The
government of India (Government of India, 2007) has prepared a White Paper on pollution
in Delhi, and this has led to the establishment of the Environmental Pollution Control Authority
with responsibility for reducing vehicular pollution. There is also a Masterplan for Delhi 2021
(Delhi Development Authority, 2010) (
Figure 5.12
), but the strategy seems largely about
extending the area of development land, and there is little emphasis on polycentric growth or
the development of new centres around the enhanced public transport network. A transport
strategy based on demand management principles, integrated with the urban development
vision, still seems a distant prospect.
Transport in Delhi is characterised by a large number of modes, a much wider range than that
conventionally found in industrialised countries. These include the private car; a large proportion
of government cars and taxis; two- and three-wheeler scooters, motorcycles and mopeds;
bicycles, the cycle rickshaw and motorised rickshaw (usually the three-wheeler auto-rickshaw,
commonly known as the tuk-tuk); informal bus; bus rapid transit; the Metro; and pedestrians.
Data on travel in Delhi is very underdeveloped, as there are other priorities to spend scarce
funding on. Hence, there is little robust understanding of movements across the city, or even
car ownership levels, and GHG and CO2 emissions are not known beyond broad estimates.
The baseline position and future projections discussed below are all based on limited data
availability, yet to an extent, this doesn't hugely matter. The scales of the projections and the
required levels of change are very evident, even with uncertain data.
Delhi's urban area has grown dramatically in the last 25 years, and much of the urban
development has been of low rise and low density form, with the exception of the informal
settlements, which of course have high population densities. The increased urban area has
resulted in increased trip lengths. But over 50 per cent of trips remain under 5 km in length,
and hence there is considerable scope for continued use of walking and cycling (Mohan and
Tiwari, 1999; Cox, 2010). There are current high mode shares for two- and three-wheelers,
cycle rickshaws and buses.
Table 5.4
gives an indication of vehicle numbers, though there is
little understanding of walking and cycling levels in relation, and the variety in the numbers
suggests some uncertainty in the actual trends. It seems certain, though, that two- and three-
wheelers retain a major share of the market, followed by cars and jeeps, the latter of which
