And I thought Americans were carbrained, holy shit.
(To be fair, he’s not wrong in that this is intended to keep the auto companies and the government nice and fat – but the obvious response to this is to agitate for better public transit, not railing against an environmentally sound policy.)
What’s this about? Government-mandated to reduce emissions? Switching to electric, or just “better” ICE cars?
AFAIK pollution is a serious problem in India’s cities - but people like this guy are going to defend their “personal freedoms” tooth and nail, and fuck the rest.
But forcing someone to replace a working vehicle? What is the environmental impact of manufacturing a new car and disposing of the old one? At what point does that actually outweigh the impact of emissions from a slightly older car, if ever?
If the government’s intent is to cut local emissions this could make sense.
He isn’t being forced to replace the car. He could walk. It’s 1km ffs
He also posted a photo of the road. It’s 2 lanes of chaotic traffic in each direction, no sidewalk. You can’t walk there, you’ll get hit by something sooner or later. It supposedly also gets up to 44C (of course on an asphalt road the air temp might be higher than that). I choose to believe that because apparently the temperature record in New Delhi is over 50C.
There must be a way to walk. Source: only a minority of Indians have cars.
Yes, you can also see mopeds and such in the photo. 2 stroke mopeds of course are even worse for emissions than cars. Modern 4 stroke ones not so much, but if you’re limited to 50cc, they’re ridiculously underpowered, not particularly long lasting, etc. Not sure what the regulations on this area in India.
And sure, you can definitely walk. You can walk on the side of a highway too, nobody’s stopping you. Why are people complaining about car centric city design in the US? You CAN walk. It’s not safe to in many places, but you CAN.
For real though, some people don’t want to walk on what is essentially a highway. It’s unsafe. There should be better options for pedestrians.
Whoa! Cool it.
The mandate isn’t from “government”. Apparently, the government failed to do much about pollution, so a regulatory body was set up by the courts, which body did some good things (ban diesels) but also some hamhanded things like judge only based on technology age rather than the odometer. Throwing away a ton of steel and manufacturing that has had minimal utilization isn’t going to help any.
You should’ve dissed the people who made scrapping the dedicated bus lane an election issue some years ago. I guess that never made it to the newspapers, and hence wasn’t discussed online either.
On the surface, yes. In reality they’re just offloading environmental responsibility on to citizens (and making them buy “better” ICE cars so the auto industry gets the profits) instead of improving and expanding public transit to make it easier to get around without a car.
To be fair, buses don’t solve last-mile situations like this one, unless you expect the route to become walkable by reduction in car numbers. Even then, I wouldn’t begrudge the busy housewife avoiding a long walk with a kid in tow.
Depends on the bus system. Some primarily operate within a square mile, and therefore primarily solve the last mile situation. They don’t solve the first/last 50m probably that isn’t really a problem anyways.
cash for clunkers without the cash
Yeah it’s kind of strange policy. It applies only to the city, in the way a congestion charge would be set up (you can drive maybe 20 km off and get fuel), but the government is hard right wing, so they tend to pick solutions which will hurt the rich the least (they already have newer cars and tend to get newer cars as the old ones wear out), and not really mean anything to the poor (they don’t have cars at all, so this is all a moot point). The “middle class” as is the example here tend to suffer.
However, the middle class also has basically no solidarity with the poor, so like they’ll readily vote for policies which just wreck the poor, and because India is a “cheap labour” country, often the middle classes are sort of like the Petty Bourgeois in that they really hate the poor asking for more rather than punching up. Add that to the whole casteism / racism thing, and I don’t really feel bad for Kapil.
The other other thing is that India (Delhi) is somehow extremely pedestrian friendly while also being extremely hostile to pedestrians. Like imagine small walkable communities surrounded by stroads and a “might makes right” approach to driving, and a government which is committed to more roads (keeps the rich and the poors separated), and you have a place where kids might be able to walk to school on their own, or have walking mean near-certain death depending on exactly where they live in relation to the school.