While petrol prices shoot up and a heatwave builds up, there’s a one-liner on social media that throws a third dimension to commuting in the National Capital Region—half of Delhi works in Gurugram and half of Gurugram works in Delhi, and they are all stuck on NH48.
The highway that connects the capital with its affluent satellite city is perpetually jammed. But a casual look will likely show that most of the cars are driven by middle-aged men flaunting their new affluence, with no other passenger in sight. The stories in Mumbai, Chennai or Bengaluru are not much different. Choked roads do not go well with aspirational lifestyles, but there’s little people do about it.
It appears all the more ironic given the ongoing oil shock. It is good to see ministers combining photoshoot moments aboard metro carriages with appeals to increase car-pooling so that we can save valuable dollars in oil imports. But this needs a reality check.
A hard look at car-pooling in India shows we have barely scratched the surface. More importantly, faced with issues that make the commonsensical idea of sharing car rides to save on fuel costs and, hopefully, commuting time is not as loaded with common sense as it would seem at first.
We need to reverse-swing our thoughts to humbler modes of transport like auto-rickshaws and the increasingly popular e-rickshaws to get a hang of what we can do about it. But before that, a few thoughts on India’s automobile culture may be in order.
It is my firm belief that three things drive India’s car boom: cheap loans, the image of a car as a status symbol and its position as a middle-class dream that dates back to the days when incomes were low and roads were barren. A lot has changed since, but a cultural hangover remains.
Before I bought my first car, I once had a neighbour down the street in Bengaluru asking if he could park his fancy Ford in my apartment parking space, but he could not afford to pay a rent for it. Another anecdote involves a Delhi colleague who told me about a shopper at a BMW showroom asking if there was a CNG engine option available so he could save on the fuel.
Cars are more of an object of vanity in urban India, even if that involves the inconvenience of getting stuck in traffic jams and paying more for the fuel.
I once worked for an environment-conscious editor who talked the company’s CEO into taking a metro ride one day—and found the boss squirming through what otherwise was a comfortable journey that saved time and cost. Indian CEOs are not supposed to take the metro, though stinking-rich Wall Street traders in New York are known to. Quo vadis, dear car-pooler?
There is a flip side to this. Car pool apps like BlaBlaCar and QuickRide are trying to solve the commuter’s problem with peer-to-peer sharing. Think of them like an Uber for private riders. But quick research reveals they have had only “segmented success”. We may well ask in startup lingo: where’s the scale in car-pooling?
All of that brought back memories of Kolkata, where I took my first Indian metro ride in 1991, preceded by my first shared autorickshaw ride to the metro station. With one auto leaving every minute in a point-to-point journey, from residential areas to the metro hub, the turnover efficiency was high.
E-rickshaws in Delhi’s suburbs like Noida, and even tempo vans in passenger mode, do pretty much the same thing. Commuters are familiar with the usual routes, the points where boarding is likely. These pick-up points are like bus stops, but unlike bulky buses that take time and space to move, e-ricks and shared autos are available at a high frequency, with a predictability of service that bolsters confidence in that system.
Mumbai’s Churchgate station already does car-pooling without the fuss. People buzz to and from Nariman Point from the station in black-and-yellow taxis with a not a word exchanged between the cabbie and the passengers. The rates are fixed, the route is known and the efficiency is high.
Now picture a scenario in Delhi, Bengaluru or Gurugram or wherever where such a model can be adopted. The way to do it is to make cars behave like metro trains or the humble e-ricks that provide valuable last-mile services.
The authorities should come up with a State-assisted plan that help car pools become ‘cab trains’ running between established pick-up and drop points. You can number them like buses, colour-code them and run them on predictable routes with clear time-tables at fixed rates. Throw in rush-hour premiums or happy-hour discounts. Such options are already quite common in inter-city rides. It is time it becomes common within metro regions.
Metro trains and e-ricks are doing it. What we need is to make the surfeit of cars blocking highways and city roads to turn into cab-train services that offer the triple play of predictability, frequency and cost efficiency that collectively spell convenience.
Perhaps we need to design government tenders to launch branded point-to-point cab services and incentivise them with higher depreciation rates and tax-free status.
Only a scale-first approach to car-pooling can make sense beyond the lip service it is often subjected to. For CXOs still worried about their status, we might as well launch shared limousines—with electric engines and uniformed chauffeurs.
Madhavan Narayanan / Reverse Swing
Senior journalist
Follow him on X @madversity
(Views are personal)
