City, Class, Cycle

An interesting conversation took place at work a few days back. I was showing a report on the bicycle-friendly policies and practices in place in the city of Copenhagen to my colleagues who are all young architects and civil engineers. The general response of my friends was that such wonderful things might be possible in a country like Denmark, but not in India – and definitely not in a city like Kolkata. The seemingly unanswerable question being posed was – "Who is going to bicycle in a city like Kolkata ? It is too dangerous!"

Dangerous it is. Not just in Kolkata, but in most urban areas in the country. That, however, does not stop people from bicycling in really large numbers. It is true that people of our socio-economic class (middle and upper-middle income category) and those even more previleged than us would hardly ever think og bicycling on our roads. But move down the class ladder and you wil find a veritable army of utility-bicyclists and pedestrians. The very next day after our conversation I did a funny little study of my own. I counted the number of bicycles I found on the road from my home in Salt Lake to my office in Topsia. The distance is about 7 kilomtres with a major stretch of it being part of the high-speed low-access, motorists' delight and bicyclists' horror arterial called the Eastern Metropolitan By-pass. On this 25 minutes drive itself I counted 106 bicycles. The actual figures must have been larger.

According to Himani Jain and Geetam Tiwari of the Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Program (TRIPP), of IIT (Delhi), the share of bicycle trips in the total number of trips made by all vehicles in large and medium sized Indian cities ranges from 13 – 21 %. In the mega cities (larger than 5 million persons) the percentage share is lesser but the absolute numbes are huge. Daily bicycle trips in these cities range from 0.7 to 1 million. These high figures exist despite the dangerous conditions for bicycling and the steady decline in the number of bicyclists as a result of the emphasis of mainstream transport planning on motorised transport.

The answer to the so called unanswerable question, is, therefore, all too obvious – millions of people are bicycling to work in Indian cities every single day. If we take into account the cycle-rickshaw drivers then millions are not only cycling to work but working on cycles. The question should rather be – who are these people and under what conditions are they compelled to cycle ? A huge share of the bicycle trips originate in the informal and other low income settlements within our cities. It is here that the class nature of sustainable non-motorised modes in our cities becomes evident.

We bicycle only when we are not rich enough to upgrade to a motor-cycle or a motor – car and once we have become rich then we are just too shy to ever use one. The risk on the streets is definitely a factor, but the psychological barrier of class-shame is just as serious. And it is the homes of the middle and upper income households which offer most of the jobs in the informal sector and attract the trips. So the ones who ride the bicycles are our carpenters, cooks, milk-men, house-maids, cleaners, gardeners, security guards, office caretakers, electricians, petty shop-owners, plumbers, masons , the guys who iron our clothes, or those who walk our pets in the evening or our kids to the school, you name it. Every time there is a hue and cry aout cleaning up the city and doing somethingn about the informal settlements (i.e. getting rid of them), we forget that it is the upper-classes, which need them just as much as they need us.

We want their services but we don't like the sight of their shanties to spoil our views. We want them to reach us quickly when our bathroom tap starts leaking but we won't even give them a decent track to walk or cycle to us safely. This adds a new layer of insensitive hypocrisy to the already distorted social structure that we have in our cities.

When we take this social view of a transportation challenge then it becomes clear that the green-bicyclist cannot win the battle for safe streets unless he or she joins hands...or pedals actually...with the utility bicyclist. This calls for serious cross-class understanding, interaction and practice. In this regard we may have much more to learn from China and Copenhagen actually. But most of all we have to learn from the experience of our own bicyclists.