There are 600 million vehicles in the world

6 million of those are in India

There are 10 lakh fatalities in road accidents in the world

1 Lakh of those fatalities occur in India alone

India has 1% of the vehicles in the world and 10% of the fatalities !

For example there are 250 million vehicles in the USA and just 50,000 fatalities in road accidents

UK has 35 million vehicles and 3500 fatalities due to road accidents

India has 6 million vehicles and 100,000 fatalities due to road accidents !

This is the condition of our road infrastructure

If we bring in the Tata Nano the cheapest car and assume it gets a 5 % market share it will directly lead to 5000 more deaths every year !

This is more than the deaths due to terrorism !

So if an enemy of India wanted to attack India, all they have to do is develop a car like the Nano, reduce traffic in our cities to a crawl, and kill 5000 Indians a year ! 

 Here is another stunner. 

Each car occupies 30 sq ft on average (assuming small cars). So 6 million cars means 180 million sq ft. A city like Bangalore with 2 million or more cars has the cars occupying 2000 acres ! So 2000 or more acres in each city is occupied by its cars ! SO if you assume one acre costs ten crore in each city then 2000 acres cost 20000 crores ! So each car occupies a land area of 60000 rupees ! (at 2000 Rs a sq ft). And you thought petrol costs were the only cost of owning a car ! The value of good public transport suddenly becomes skyhigh !

Can u imagine if we calculated the wasted time due to slow moving traffic? All these high powered cars moving at snails pace. Such a waste of fuel.
 
So What is the solution?

Underground railway in all cities. This should have been started ten years ago. Now huge tolls and taxes will have to be levied in cities to control traffic resulting in serious damage to the profitablity of auto companies

But where were the auto companies when they saw the infrastructure in the cites crumbling? Did they not see that their business would be the first to be affected? They should have set up high powered committees to study the situation and forced the politcians to do something. Now they are the sufferers for their lack of vision

Today there is no alternative. We should put all our resources into underground railway in all cities immediately and expedite the construction of satellite cities (run by private enterpreneurs- no more municipal corporations). 

Satellite cites as in my earlier blog should be created in 5 directions from all major cities and high speed links to these satellite cities should be built. This will decongest the main cities and give them life

Also another solution is to create parking buildings all over the city in each public area and shopping area. After creating this infrastructure parking cars on roads should be banned in all these areas. This will reduce congestion on roads.
 
Who will build these car parking buildings? Private enterpreneurs ! Why? Because a parking building costs one third that of an office building and once the govt offers tax benefits and allows them to charge Rs 10 per car per hour this will become an excellent business ! This will force everyone to think twice before taking out their cars. This will reduce traffic  congestion and make our roads easier to drive on.