There's No Tomorrow (Make sure you watch ALL of this video)

This is a long watch, but do watch it. Its illuminating, thought provoking, and sums things up really really well.

It must be screened at every school. They're the ones who'll have to face it. They're the ones who'll need to discard everything we've taught them to be true and right and relearn, rediscover, experiment. All the while burdened with a terrible terrible legacy that we would have left them with.

The energy, oil economy decided everything, and the monetary system that encouraged growth, has needed more and more and more of it. The bacteria-in-the-bottle analogy is chilling.

Growth (as currently pursued) indeed is a huge problem - its a brave thing to call that one out in the current madness for it as the panacea that can bring democracy, solve hunger, provide for all and solve anything at all. 

Alternative energy, conservation, recycling - these are all twigs we're trying to use to try and hold against the ground to stop the bus hurtling rapidly towards the cliff. Nothing will "solve" it unless we relook at - or are forced to relook at - how we continue to live, and how many of us do. 

Our lack of acknowledgement, our inability to understand and react appropriately to this fundamental truth is apalling, scary and frustrating. 

There's no way of continuing the current way we live and hope technology will solve it enough so we can get away without having to do anything.

Thankfully, the movie does suggest a few fixes, and they're all tough. I don't see many willing or able to adapt to live the better life, and we'll eventually do when forced to.

• Question growth, globalization : they're pure bad as practised, NOT good.
• Walk, cycle more since you'll have to. Drive less. Way lesser.
• Buy less. Please. Everything,
• Buy local, seasonal, unpackaged.
• Fight fears and imagined inconveniences - the big ones haven't hit yet.
• Doing "more physical work" is NOT a bad thing.
• Get out of banking/globalized currency - its tough but make a start
  • A few ideas 
    • Potlucks to substitute restaurants
    • Barter skills and services
    • Co-operate for manpower needs, don't always buy it
    • Use everything longer
    • Optimize the hell out of everything
    • Slower, less commercial forms of entertainment
    • Grow some food
• Learn more about the land, growing food, water
  • We've lost half the topsoil in the last couple of 100 years!
  • We've completely lost any understanding of the carrying capacity of a place
• Learn more about building homes from stuff around you
• Re-invest in community - time and effort, not money

The current financial economy and monetary system are indeed a ponzi scheme. Frustrating that we're so wedded to it and almost powerless to fiind a way out.

Sometimes I think our faith in technology is a mere betrayal of our conceit, but it might just be the stupid-filter masquerading as smartness and intelligence. Our total lack of ability to connect the dots is apalling.

Or maybe we're just too scared to ask questions, change lifestyles that deviate from the marketed/accepted status quo.

2048, I'd say, is the new doomsday. In less dramatic ways but figuratively, yes. I'll probably die before that but in a terrible state of mind.

We're soooooo screwed. Sorry, kids, that we couldn;t see this, couldn't behave ourselves and were too weak to improve things in the face of the instant pleasure.

 

Growth - !,?,??,:(

Here's a good one I came across this morning

Have been thinking about "growth" as it has started to mean to us. We say we need growth economies to generate enough to fee the growing billions. 

Trickle down has failed, so I guess growth isn't what its made out to be? It probably does create opportunity - but its too random, too sporadic and too destructive as well.

Economic growth - growth in energy consumption/production - growth in consumption of goods one didnt really need - growth of waste - growth of disease and illness.

We're 7 billion - up from 2 billion since the advent of modern medicine, industrialization. All those cliched essays discussing technology being a boon or bane in the larger context suddenly seem less irrelevant.

Isn't it shortsighted/narrow to assume there's no other model? Can there not be one around sustainability - of populations, economies, environment, consumption, energy. That seems to be nature's way for sure - and we've sucked at most things we dont out of sync with nature. 

Are we caught up in local maximas as a specieis - totally unable to see that the cancer is spreading too fast and we're not nearly as smart as we've started believing we are? We don't even pause to consider other models, other ways of being, other modes of existence.

Will inertia of motion, and this local maxima of intelligence, kill us?

The government, the government

Everything is wrong because the government does nothing. 

Thats our reaction to, and way and extent of dealing with issues that we come face to face with, and having done this, continuing whatever it is we were doing earlier. 

The environment is not the government's responsibility. Its ours. We wither encourage, or let the government do certain things and so they happen. We clamour for better roads because we collectively have faster, better, more driving as a goal we've acquired from our trips to the western world, and want to see that here.

The GoI has implemented a whole lot of laws for controlling pollution, protecting forests, etc.

We - citizens - homeowners, industrial stakeholders, consumers, car drivers, etc - try our damndest to maintain status quo and not disturb things unless it has a direct positive material impact on our lives.

The BMTC has improved bus services manifold, both in terms of quantity and quality. Yet we continue forwarding one excuse or the other to avoid giving up on our perception of "convenience" in our own cars. Inertia is dearer to us than the condition of the species and the planet going forward.

We ape bad retail habits we have seen in the west merely because they seemed cool there, and we are too shy/lazy to stand out refusing plastic to put each individual vegetable purchase into before getting it weighed at our malls. Blame the government for that too ?

Sure these are small steps, but there's little hope of evolving the right collective goals, pushing the government towards real positive change, etc, from a population thats by and large content living off unsustainable behaviour for short term gains, and considering finger pointing as adequate contributiuon.

Somewhere, I fear the future will treat us with irritated scorn and incredulous disbelief for our shortsightedness.

Posted via email from bangalorekaapi

Legacy

The kids need a better world.

Better broadband ?

Better digital interfaces ?

More connected online communities ?

Cooler handhelds ?

Quicker cars ?

Or cleaner air ?

Water ? (Man, this one is getting close.)

Livable cities ?

What do we leave behind ?

Plastic hills ?

Fenced, protected, expensive fresh water sources ?

Bubbles of glass inside which breathing is possible ?

Anger, despair, anxiety as the collective consciousness ?

Will they mock us ?

Curse ?

Deride our shortlived choices ?

Our escapist mechanisms to cope with threats ?

The generations that did not stand and fight and solve.

But escaped into the nether.

Created money, and used it to hide the sins.

Our lifespans are a curse, I read somewhere.

Looks like the curse is on our kids. And we're responsible.

I'm just wondering if there's a breaking point someplace and if we're all Neros.

Posted via email from bangalorekaapi

Honesty

Like that cigarette packs carry warnings, and scary pictures.

Shouldn't car ads show the 2.3kgs of CO2 ?

Shouldn't "convenient" sachets and packaging show the mountains of plastic piled up everywhere ?

Shouldn't the super-floor-cleaners, and soaps, and detergents, carry "screwing-your-groundwater" signs ?

Shouldn't food mention the pesticides used ?

Its all about convenient truths or inconvenient lies. Some, we just ignore. 

Of course I do not support smoking. I'm just saying we need to apportion our horror and disgust to other equally worrying problems as well. Irrespective of how benign advertising and media messages makes them seem (esp car ads!)

Posted via email from bangalorekaapi

Its Staring in Your Face

Mid July, and the monsoon is still not really here. Great weather in Bangalore, sure. But precious little rain. They're saying it'll pick up soon, but its a month and a half late!

And its much much worse elsewhere. Imagine getting 30 minutes of water once every 7 days in a major city! Or killing people who steal it unfairly.

I still hear arguments about there being no conclusive evidence of human impact causing global warming and the associated changes. Does it matter ? What's scary is our state od denial, as a species. We continue to worry about property rates, and iPhone releases, and stock market swings.

It sounds like a doomsday scenario, but these troubles could arrive faster than we can live with. Our decades long focus on overspecialization may be our undoing. Shouldn't we all be learning - at a ferocious pace - how to utilize every last bit of freshwater that comes our way from any source ? Isn't it time to not worry about our inconveniences, discomfort, etc and fight whats rapidly becoming a raging inferno threatening to engulf us all ? Why are we so myopic ? Why are we so focused on the here and now that nothing matters beyond the next couple of quarters.

India's population - that had migrated from Africa - had supposedly been decimated about 75000 years ago. And we wallow in the shallowness of our "long cultural history" and what not. Do we even have a sense of how fragile we are, and how wantonly we could be screwing it up, and at the same time losing the skills that'll help us cope when things change ?

To me, its no longer a question of how much, or tokenism. The severe effects of climate change are here, now, and we better figure out both how to reduce our impact as catalysts (even if it is a natural process, the amount of carbon we're helping release cannot be without impact) and how to use whatever little we have as best as possible. We need to let go of our collective greed, look beyond our noses and egos, and not shy away from making dramatic changes. As individuals, as societies and as countries. The developed vs non-developed standoff on who needs to cut emissions by how much seems utterly puerile - you're hurtling towards a cliff in the same bus and debating about who needs to put the brakes on ? Perhaps we the crazy homo sapiens have it coming deservedly.

Admittedly, I'm not feeling too optimistic this morning. I only hope I'm not right either.

Sustainability : Needs, Possession and Sharing

The Story of Stuff video that I mentioned in my last post talks about how consumption was pretty much engineered to keep the ever higher production capacities going. It mentions that 99% of all stuff produced in the US gets discarded within 6 months! People are egged to buy, buy more and keep buying by messages that communicated the strategies of planned and perceived obsolescence to consumers.

Need ?

Some words thrown in this mix of marketing, messaging are cool, need, efficient, faster, cheaper, savings. Its either a sense of comparison with the rest of the world around you, and often a false sense of missing out on something thats started to define even what used to be basic "needs".

Brushes that tell you they're due for a change. Phones which are so out of date in year that you have not even used a small fraction of its features, but that new one is so much sleeker. Cars which drive perfectly alright, but hey we're not keeping parts available beyond 2010.

Water ? Yes, even good old h2o has gone aspirational with major lifestyle water brands!

Possess!

Even worse is stuff that we use maybe a couple of weeks in a year, but each of us must have!

We have a ladder at home that's needed once is a while. A couple of people asked how much it was, etc, and I suggested they could use ours since we didn't need it at that point. It now gets circulated a lot within our apartment complex and its saved a lot of people a lot of space, money and all of us a lot of needless products sold!

Sharing is a simple tool that will work for a lot many things like it worked for the ladder!

Kids, for instance, see a lot of toys with their friends, and there's an immediate follow-up at home with a demand that the same be mad available. Parents, especially those with busy schedules and decent disposable incomes, by and large give in to "not deny my kids simple pleasures". The alternative, which a few parents around where we live have started practicing, is to encourage kids to interact, and share whatever they have. Not only does it avoid unnecessary purchases (have you seen the number of toys that just live inside boxes and under beds once they're brought home?) - but also helps social interaction, negotiation skills, and a respect for valuation of considered needs and desires over every impulse to own this and have that.

What else can we share ?

Carpooling is a form of sharing as well. Taking a bus is sharing-nirvana!

I remember a whole bunch of us sitting around our neighbour's TV set during major cricket series when we were kids. It was actually a whole lot more fun than watching the matches alone, as is the norm now. Hand-me-downs still keep my daughter's wardrobe quite fresh and there's a minor freecycling movement of sorts in our apartment around kids prams, cots, clothes, shoes, etc!

Its sometimes economics that forces these choices. But I have increasingly felt a need for these choices driving our economics. Built it around services that work for sustainability, and not consumption.

The Story of Stuff, the Price of Things, Etc

Came across this awesomely done video that explains in brief what we've been doing wrong.

I'd written earlier about us not paying for the "real costs" and the need for building those into economic models so long term damage to the ecology, our health, our social structures is tougher to get away with. The video talks about that point, amongst other things. Its a very good way to understand what is really broken holistically.

The sad part is, the consumption led model and its associated economic, marketing theory was sold very aggresively through all the literature created around it, and all the institutions that sell it through multiple fora - both economic and social. Our world trade models, the basis of and assumptions for free trade, and even key economic indicators of growth, poverty and properity are influenced by these motivations and models. Its all pretty broken, and depressing. Modern economists are more or less at a loss when it comes to figuring out fixes that look beyond these problems that have led to ecological, social and more recently, even financial distress across the globe.

I think the solution is not top down, but bottom-up - like the video suggests as well. We need to move away from consumption at our individual levels, and stop identifying and defining our lives through the brands we own or consume and consumer choices we make all the time. It'll force a rethink and change at various levels, and best of all, will lower aspirational stress, improve our conenctions as producers and nourishers - not just consumers, and force the evolution of alternative models for economic success and growth.

Growing Forests

Organizations like Trees For Free and Hasiru Usiru are doing a commendable job of trying to enhance and protect our tree cover.

However, there is a basic contradiction in greening goals and urban landscapes - the latter is about "usage" of land - and that more in commercial terms than anything else. Everything else is secondary - and even the space legally, or voluntarily, created for trees and natural cover, is done as a major concession and something to be proud of.

Of course, it is something to be proud of. But its also something we should have realized by now that we depend on as a species - for keeping things cool, keeping the air fresh, and for keeping the water cycle going. Its not something that should be a discretionary afterthought, but the most important part of evolving urban landscapes.

Sure. But thats merely an ideal, and we're really really, really far from it.

In the hierarchy of needs and wants, the above ideal is pretty low. So while there's sporadic resistance, and occasional sparks of desire, and even action to see more green and less stone, prick, mortar and glass - its more or less a losing battle. The vocabulary is "cut as few trees as possible", or "try growing trees where it does not affect your foundations", etc. Can't blame anyone - thats how it is - and everyone's got fair reasons for it. N-thousand-per-square-foot is quite a compelling reason, more often than not. And pollution related disease and death is not that visible a counter-force. Sure the water's depleting, but our tanker guy manages to get us enough, and we're ok for now....

So ? We carry on ? What else could we do ?

So here's a whacky idea...

I've been vocalizing that the governement needs visionary goals, and one of those must be to grab back free land where available, not play the per-square-feet game, and afforest it with a manic zeal. But of course, I have little influence, and not too much hope that the government will formulate such goals and move in these directions.

Next best ? We do it. Me and you cannot go around buying too much land to afforest. But collectively, we could start building a layer of green defenses - perhaps within, and perhaps also around the city. A forest here, a green island there, maybe even an acre with a lake and a lot of trees.

A trust owns and manages the land. We legally ensure it can never be used for any other purpose. We try and ensure its marked as "forest" or "parks" in CDPs.

If 100000 people put in a 500/- each, thats a lot of forest land we could create around the city (25-30 kms away its still not that expensive). Sure there are legal hurdles, issues around policy formulation, long term goals, and financing issues. Worth a shot ? If it grows, I'm sure a few corporates would not mind pitching in.

Questions about loss of farmland and food security just in case this idea grows? Agriculture needs better techniques, innovation. As part of this effort, we can engage both for that as well as for conservation.

If 10 people respond to this, will create a mailing list, and a spreadsheet to collect "committments".

Idea? Non starter? Thoughts?

Our e-port card so far

Having become more "enlightened" citizens, we've been trying to reduce our footprint as much as possible. Here's a few things achieved, and a few more to go.

+ I cycle to work 90%+ of the time
+ We reuse the "waste" water ejected by the RO filter
+ The automatic dryer is strictly for emergencies - not switched on for ages now
+ Try and aggressively avoid "standby mode" for TV/Home theatre/chargers - still left on 30% of the time tho :(
+ Determined to do fewer kilometers on the car. Working out very well, thank you!
+ Been trying to promote cycling in our circle of influence, and beyond. Decent success.

- Cannot seem to reduce geyser usage. Love warm water, and attempts at minimizing time switched on have failed.
- Have not revived attempts towards en-mass adoption of solar heating in our apartment complex
- Have failed in attempt towards getting apartment to optimize usage of diesel for backup gensets
- The Standby Switchoff is only a partial success - needs more work
- Plastic usage is still not low. There's so much that comes packaged in plastic from the stores :(

Overall, pleased - but there's scope for improvement.

Lets make Bangalore Hotter

There's a power cut right now. I'm at home, and last year we'd taken a call to not start the gensets between 10am-5pm if the electricity was out.

Its in the lower 30s right now - and thats out in the sun. This being Bangalore, the breeze is still pleasant, and its perfectly tolerable indoors, unless you've grown up in the Upper Himalayas or the Arctic or at least Canada. But there are mails about the unbearable heat, asking for backup power to be restored immediately. The power cuts are shorter these days, and surely we can afford this!

Can we ? Our apartment complex uses 2x180KWh generators to keep the backup power going. At peak loads, utilization has rarely exceeded 40%. During the day its worse - with most people at office. Can we really afford to keep making Bangalore hotter, and crib about the heat, and keep running gensets longer as we strain the power supply with a larger and larger demand for energy to keep our airconditioners running perpetually?

Yes, we've got so used to keeping airconditioning running all the time at work, in the cars, that the lack of it makes it unbearable? (Honest, its in no way hot as I type this. My daughter's here too, and not even close to complaining about the heat).

What can we do ? There's been talk of trying to connect both gensets and try and reduce the diesel consumption to a minimum. But the action's been slow, and I fear will die out once the gensets are back on fulltime. There's also the aspect of redefining what "need" is and the things we "cannot live without" as a society.

We in the middle class blame the government a lot for most stuff. Lack of roads, lack of electricity supply, lack of public transport, and everything else. Often rightly so. But my observation in the recent past also leads me to believe that we're quite insensitive and focused on our short term needs, even at a huge cost to our long term benefits. The craz.y salary spiral, the real estate bubble, the growing use of cars even for basic grocery shopping, the string of excuses for not using public transport, etc - these are all symptoms of a common malaise -"let me solve that little bit of an issue and who the hell cares if the cost is huge - I didn't create the problem after all". We keep giving in too easily, to too many "necessities", at too large a cost. I really have nothing against convenience, but we could start showing some level of sensitivity towards ensuring the footprint these cause is reduced as much as possible. Monetarily, we can surely afford that.

Fair enough. Sure, I'm probably over-reacting and hyper-ventilating, but then I'm also despairing.

Edit : just noticed the Google Ads on the side for this page - both hilarious and depressing. Commerce, ah.

The Standard of Living Problem

This was sent on the Bangalore Bikers' Club group. Someone also noticed the mention that in the 70s, 71% of passenger trips were made on bicycles! He also commented that "It was better than Copenhagen."

So Bangalore, and in fact most of the country, did have a bike culture - ? Except it was hardly a culture - but more of a lack of choice. Our species is so governed by defined and accepted "standards" that we soon got hit by technology, and all that. And as affordability/incomes improved, there was only one path that spelled "progress" and we took to our Vespas and Lambrettas like there was no tomorrow, licence raj notwithstanding.

And so on and so forth. The used Ambys, Padminis, the landscape changing 800 and Gypsy for the braver souls, and in more recent part the plethora of options with more and more features becoming 'standard' and airconditioning becoming the only visible way to battle the noxiousness this progress brought into our lives.

The argument given, usually, is that this is the "price" of development and economic progress.

Really ? Are we so dumb that there's only the whole of one of two or three models to be picked from ? Nah, we just never bothered to define our own report card and terms of progress.

So its someone else's "standards" we're trying to catch up with - consumption of electricity, fuel, goods leading the march. Upsizing, a "standby" mode for everything at home, western WCs, zippy long expressways to merely get to work - all are symptoms of this affliction.

These "standards" have started to interfere with the "living" in a big way. Gotta evolve beyond the aping we've gotten into. Gotta be smarter than the species has been in the last 30-40 years or so.

Drive Less.

Car Exhaust, Air Pollution and the Environment: Health Effects of Exhaust Chemicals

Make this a goal in your life. Walk, take the bus (and divide the kms by the number of passengers!). Ride a bike. Whatever. Just reduce the total number of kms per head done in Bangalore (or any city) by 30-40%, and we'll have solved a whole bunch of problems at one go.

Yes you have that usual reason of inconvenient public transport, or timings, or distance.

Same kinda reasons to not go jogging, or running, or start the big project you've been trying to.

We're a rather procrastinating species, it seems. Its starting to boil down to how much longer we want to sustain. Do you want to, or not ? Take a little bit of pain or inconvenience to get started, and try help solve the pain points instead.

Its not someone else's job to do this or that first before it becomes oh-so-totally easy for you to ride/bus/walk. its your job as well.

Come on. Let's shake our collective slumber and zombie-ness and get cracking. Use the automobile when necessary. And preferably, with 4 people inside.

Strike...

...when the iron's hot :)

The Oil PSU strike is a good excuse and a good time to pick a bike up - and reduce your dependence on carbon fuels. Its such a pleasure riding past petrol pumps and not havin the worry in one's head.

Also

* improve your health
* reach office happier (way lesser road rage), quicker (its really true)
* save money
* be greener
* help plan a better city, indirectly!

Re-introduction to Biking @ Redwoods, off Sarjapura Road:

We're doing a session on biking at our apartment on Sunday, the 11th of Jan at around 9:30am with help from the Ride-A-Cycle Foundation and Bangalore Bikers.

What to expect:

* Many snazzy looking bikes!
* Q&A on whats bike fit, and its importance
* Gears - do you need them ?
* Biking scene in Bangalore!
* Commuting by bike - is it really possible ? Issues - safety/clothes/locking, answers.
* What bike ? Where? Servicing? Costs ?
* It costs 20k!!!??? Wow ? Why ?
* Check out/Test ride some bikes.
* Any other questions you might have.

Will try getting some of the folks who deal with these bikes as well. In any case most people there will be able to help out with the various brand, model and price options.

Park Vista, Eastwoods folks, Trinity Woods/Acres and others in the area are welcome as well. Please let your friends around there know. Hope to see as many there as possible....

Lazy Blogger

This is a nice n lazy post about stuff I've stumbled across.

Good reason to start cycling

Cycling Safety : Everyday tips, not just the helmet.

A nice poem about bikes

Is this doable, Bangalore ? Should try.

Still in the post TFN mood - what a ride!

Bangalore's Traffic Solutions ?

A nice set of slides discussing various obvious ones.

Bangalore traffic - Solution

Uploaded on authorSTREAM by das | Upload your own presentation

If we don't start thinking NOW, and wake up from the sexy sleek-car-on-a-highway dream and short term convenience-of-a-car-myth, we will choose a very scary future.

Increasing road space is surely not the way to go. A network of smaller sub-cities, fewer long commutes, buses to connect the networks, wayyy more lung space - those are the options to focus on. Even at the cost of a short term pain for car users. Come to think of it, does their pain have any scope for increase ? Its horrible enough as is.

More dreams for Bangalore ?

e² | transport | paris: vélo liberté | PBS - a good quick tour of community owned biking efforts in Paris. Narrator : Brad Pitt!

Imagine a 2 kilometer radius around Cauvery Jn (M.G. Road and Brigade Road) off limits to ALL private transport - and open to

• electric buses
• a few electric Taxis (Revas)
• cycles

Now imagine there being a pool of cycles - available at each entry/exit point to this city core. Imagine enough cycle lots, a standard "fare" for the bikes with a part refund when you drop it off. Imagine a standardized bus prepaid fare for this zone. Imagine less road space in the town center and more of the existing roads converted to tree lines boulevards and gardens.

Imagine....

(We might actually start visiting that part of town again!)

(If not Bangalore, who else? We're progressive, or are we?)

Someone please save us

Everyone I know is worried about climate change. But as this article points out - the disconnect in what we do as individuals and its impact on the environment, and on the polity which is responsible for affecting changes to policy for reducing this impact, is so high that most people shrug their shoulders, and, in essence, collectively continue to wait for environmental-doomsday.

I've personally started cycling, and am avoiding "upgrading" appliances, the car, etc for the heck of it. At home we try and reuse as much as possible. I try keeping the showers short and the buckets have shrunk in size. We're now also reusing the "waste" water from the RO filter.

Yet I so easily "forget" to switch off appliances at the socket - lots continue to run in standby. Our apartment's per capita consumption of energy is probably closer to levels in the developed world rather than the rest of India.

Why should fossil-fuel derived energy be cheap and plentiful (not a murmur when petrol prices dropped!)? Why should plastic be handed out with everything that comes wrapped in plastic at the store ? Why can't we calculate the real cost of these ? It should really really hurt to commute long distances in private cars - especially 1/2 people in a car.

I quite like the idea of growing some food on your own - as the article urges - and reconnect to the less specialized roles human civilization used to have. "But I have no time" is the easy one.

I guess human beings really have little time as a species - but looking beyond our noses isn't something we've gotten good at. We'll learn when the flooding happens even more often, and the hurricanes, or the out-of-turn snow, and droughts. Or maybe not even then.

Maybe its ok - whoever said we should never go extinct.

Edit:

For a while we've happily pointed fingers west saying "oh the US contributes 25% for 5% of the world's population" - no more - look at our meteoric "growth" on the pollution charts here.

Bangalore needs this debate, at least

Copenhagenize.com - The Copenhagen Bike Culture Blog: Bike Licences Are Stupid

Well, what we really need is more cycling. The lanes, debates, etc will follow. My recent trip to Delhi presented a scary vision - would hate to see Bangalore go down that path. The city exists for its roads, and getting things moving from point X to Y - and the costs for that are very very high. The Netherlands model is something far more desirable, but to start with the debate about discouraging private cars on public roads needs to be sparked.

That link above has some great reasons for cycling - from the city's point of view. The comments also bring forth a whole bunch of information that was new and illuminating to me personally. Good read.

Edit : Found a paper discussing the sprawl, the automobile and alternatives. To me its a pretty simple equation, we need to focus on getting carbon fuel powered vehicles to travel as less as possible - and the form, flow and design of the urban landscape should just follow this thought. Make it painful to travel long distances, park in crowded centres, or even drive a privately owned vehicle. The clamour for better buses, trains, cycling lanes, shorter commutes will just happen. The first requirement is to build consensus for disincentivising private transportation outside of, say, a 5 kilometre zone of one's place of residence. Parallely, develop smarter bus routes, bike lanes. Make sure its better to walk or ride or bus than drive.

How many riders....

Have been trying to collect details about how many people ride to work etc in Bangalore.

Now that the numbers of regular commuters who've responded has hit 50, sharing - the surveys still open and hope to see the numbers hit 100+

From Blogger Pictures