Ground Report

Everyone’s talking about it… its the toast of the news channels today and the newspapers tomorrow It is made for the ‘Indian middle class family’ after Ratan Tata saw a family of 4 riding on a scooter, precariously balanced on a wet, slushy road. Of course, it is a boon for such families to travel. It’ll definitely make travel much more comfortable for the avg Indian family. But, i shudder to think what will happen to the traffic conditions once this car comes into production. Imagine this… at a conservative estimate, even if 10% of the 2 wheelers are replaced by this car, just think of the impact it will have on our traffic. Already, with so many buses, cars and 2 wheelers, the traffic is choc-a-bloc. There’s probably not one stretch of time between 7 am and 10 pm that there’s not a jam in some place of the city. That is when the cars are fairly beyond the reach of the common man or more importantly, working individuals. So, with the release of this car, a major chunk of the buyers will be those who currently own 2 wheelers… i.e, The middle class families, the single people who currently use premium segment bikes (range of 50k – 80k). And, sadly, this makes up the bulk of the traffic here. And when all these vehicles are replaced by cars… the impact on the city will be enormous… * first of all, the traffic will become even worse… a commute that takes an hour now would increase to about 2 * secondly, parking problems for cars which are already quite high in the city will escalate further… in turn, increasing haphazard parking and hence screwed up traffic. * petrol consumption is so high when a majority of the population is using bikes which give a decent mileage… now imagine the same ‘majority’ population using cars with mileage of about 20 as opposed to bikes which give a minimum of 35-40 (the ones that give mileage below this are very few) Now, many people may argue that 1 of this car will ferry 4 people and hence, 4 bikes off the road… but when everyone owns one car, each of them would want to travel alone or at their convenience or at their timings, etc which will take the bike off – car on ratio to roughly 1:1 🙁 Though i think its a great thing that we’re having a car that is this economical, in a way its also a bane keeping in view the current traffic conditions. Bottomline, though many people maybe happy about finally being able to own a car, i’m not too happy about our roads being even more congested with a thousand more cars.