Going from Green to Greener

The Smart Mobility Conference 2024-Enabling Responsible Mobility was organised during the 12th edition of Asia’s leading Integrated Expo TrafficInfraTech from 22nd to 24th October at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi. Day one opened with a panel discussion on Mobility India: From Green to Greener, with the keynote address being delivered by Michael Schuch, CEO, SWARCO. The discussion was moderated by Prof. Ashish Verma, Transportation Systems Engg, Convenor, Sustainable Transportation Lab, Dept. of Civil Engg. Indian Institute of Science and included panellists Shreenivas Prabhakararao, CEO-India, Viaplus By VINCI Highways and Manjunath Sekhar, Head, Sustainable Urban Mobility Innovation Living Lab, GIZ.

Appreciating the title ‘Green Mobility Greener Future’-Prof. Ashish Verma wondered how one could create a win-win situation for both the transportation sector and the government in achieving their development and sustainability goals. Solutions needed to be tailored, positioned and adopted to ensure they solved core transportation and mobility challenges as well as helped achieve a greener future.

Transportation is a stimulator for prosperity and wealth as it is considered the backbone of a healthy and strong economy, said Schuch, whose company has been in the business of road safety for 55 years. Key to a more efficient, safe and sustainable road traffic network is in embracing new technologies; be it artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, cloud solutions, cloud processing and edge computing. Vehicle to infrastructure communication as well as predictive algorithms lead not only to optimise traffic flows but also reduce congestion and accidents which ultimately reduce carbon emission or greenhouse gases.

While rules and regulations are good, EU has become over-regulated and bureaucratic resulting in higher costs and lesser innovation. India is attracting investors and companies that will establish factories, development and research centres so India must support them and not make

it harder for them to do business here.

– Michael Schuch

While Europe is passing through a difficult period economically, the Indian market is seeing significant investment and growth with billions of dollars going into building and maintaining road infrastructure. Based on learnings from developed countries, India has a huge opportunity to address such growth in a sustainable, holistic way that can be farsighted. Budget allocation should be for not just initial investment but also for maintenance so that systems deployment is effective and the infrastructure being built is for lifetime.

 Making the very inspiring keynote address, Michael Schuch spoke of the three pillars of sustainability, viz. environmental, social and economic. Environmental sustainability is managing resources and reducing pollution, social sustainability focuses on equity, justice and community well being and economic sustainability requires businesses to balance profit with environmental and social considerations. One cannot set goals in any one of these elements without considering the implications or impact on the other.

Currently in Europe, transport emissions represent around 25% of all greenhouse gas emissions of which 78% are related to road traffic alone. Other statistics show that 30% of the vehicles cruise around in some cities just searching for the nearest parking spot. Hundred thousand premature deaths in the continent happen because of air pollution and several statistics point to the importance of sustainability. Schuch’s company works from sustainable production facilities and is trying to optimise processes as facilities are located where energy costs are high. Optimising processes will bring down costs and help compete in the international market. The use of green energy wherever possible in manufacturing and developing products that last long, consuming energy optimally are other factors the company is focusing on.

Post independence the railways share of passengers was almost 80% while road was just about 20%. Today it is almost the reverse. This is the unsustainable situation we have got ourselves into and if we keep investing in and supplying more highways we will see as now, a rise in the number of accidents. We therefore need to strike a balance. Countries like Austria and Germany with much higher GDP and per capita annual income have 60% of their population using public transport. We need to bring about this change in India.

– Ashish Verma

The European Green Deal policy seeks to make EU carbon neutral by 2050. Based on this, a go green initiative has been developed as part of social sustainability to educate stakeholders on what is possible with smart transportation systems and that technology is available for the asking. Sustainability needs to become a mandatory requirement in the public procurement process; it should be non-negotiable and include the whole product lifecycle. There must be regional and global collaboration when it comes to policies on sustainability. Unlike the EU model, India would do well not to over-regulate for it will stifle innovation. Cultivating this in the beginning of the growth curve will ensure a sustainable legacy for the country.

Prof. Verma said that historically, the way transportation solutions have been addressed has been supply-centric. Physical infrastructure for future needs is looked at and roads are added, widened and flyovers created. With limited resources like land and energy, there is an impact on local environment and the climate, leading to the realisation that a supply-centric approach is no longer sustainable for this planet. Adding to these conditions, emerging economies like India have heterogeneity in the traffic system, non-lane-based driving behaviour, road safety issues and poor integration between land-use and transport. In addition, India is a country with high population, dense cities and exponential vehicular growth. All this has led to high transport externalities resulting in a growing focus on sustainability with a strong systems approach.

It is required to first optimise the existing infrastructure and then think about future additions. There is a need to manage demand as well as sustain the resources of this planet. This has led to the emergence of a more interesting approach of positioning, mapping, remote sensing, data science, operations research, modeling and simulation and even deriving from consumer theory and economics. Additionally, communications, electronics, IT, Big Data and IoT, image processing are all disciplines that are substantially contributing to deriving solutions. Because of the earlier supply-centric approach of providing road infrastructure, cities are currently trapped in a vicious circle of congestion. One solution could be to limit the ownership and use of personal vehicles and encourage public transport.  Another could be to bring people closer to their place of work.

Countries like the US, Australia and Japan, which have high GDP per capita have seen growth and saturation at some point between 600-800 cars per thousand population. India is yet to enter the steep growth period of GDP but is already seeing saturation levels of traffic at 20-25 cars per thousand. This is an opportunity as well as a challenge. While India’s ambitious growth plan is to be a developed economy by 2047, which means having to reach at least USD18,000 to 20,000 GDP per capita as against the current USD3,000, it is required to decouple car ownership from economic growth to see a sustainable future.

Prof. Verma opines India must saturate at a much lower rate of car ownership as compared to some of the developed countries in order to have a sustainable future. Economic growth is not the sole measure of increasing mobility. In some countries, while car ownership levels have been similar, the usage in terms of vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT) by motorised modes have been lesser, case in point being Japan. Therefore, transportation planning should not be just about removing congestion and reducing V/C ratio but also about reducing total VKT by motorised mode.

There is a way to measure emission based on the tolling transactions that we handle whether that be from a free flow perspective or video transactions. In India we process around two billion transactions a year          from a FASTag perspective from our system, which is about 35 to 40% of the total number of transactions. The measure however is not accurate and the focus is not there to bring accountability to report such findings in our ecosystem.

– Shreenivas Prabhakararao

Three fundamental strategies for a green future would be to reduce the number of motorised vehicles, reduce kilometres travelled by all motorised modes and shift energy mix to renewable sources. The impact of use of smart solutions can be felt in infrastructure development (trip generation, OD flows, mode choice, route choice), O&M (traffic congestion, speed, travel time, reliability and passenger information systems etc,), maintenance (regular road condition assessment, transport network assessment), policy and planning (trip generation, OD flows, activity choice, destination choice, mode and route choice), safety and security (accident data analysis and prediction, crime detection and black spot detection) and law enforcement (intelligent violation detection and penalisation).

Prabhakararao’s company’s approach to sustainability is to categorise emission scopes as BURN (direct emissions from sources owned or controlled by a company), BUY (Indirect emissions from purchased electricity, steam, heat and cooling) and BEYOND (upstream and downstream emissions associated with a company’s activities). Results of studies based on these scopes demonstrate that free-flow ETC reduces CO2 emissions by up to 60% when compared with traditional gated toll plazas. Scopes 1 & 2 also enable energy efficiency, cleaner vehicles and renewable energy. Scope 3 incorporates green initiatives on roadways, with partners and subcontractors and territories (land). Multiple approaches for infrastructure sustainability include immediate energy savings with LED bulbs, solar panels and modern HVAC systems, promoting clean air by promoting electric vehicle usage, environmental protection by optimising project design, reforestation and wildlife crossings and recycling and reusing road building material. His company bats for zero net emissions by 2050 by proving fleet electrification, green amenities for travellers, solar power plants and smart, adaptive lighting technology.

From the privacy standpoint, the EU GDPR rules are so prohibitive for countries to collect information to the extent that even OD details are very difficult for them to get. I would highlight that as something to be

cautious about.

– Manjunath Sekhar

Sekhar from GIZ, which is part of the Indo-German collaboration providing technical cooperation to GoI on mobility where Germany has committed over a billion euros of financial support to India in the area of sustainable mobility in cities, shared three main programs on the same. Sustainable Urban Mobility program is working with nine cities through MOHUA largely focusing on improving public transportation, active mobility, integrated mobility planning and capacity building. The next being E-mobility, which focuses on heavy commercial vehicles including buses and trucks and thirdly, Green Freight, which is focused entirely in the logistics space.

Their Living Lab initiative in Bangalore is focused on working with the community enabling it with responsible mobility towards slow streets, specifically reducing speeds. The reduction in speed in one of the pilot projects from 55kmph to 23kmph has increased the number of pedestrians and cyclists. A recent development is that the community has taken ownership of a public electric bicycle sharing system that is not revenue-driven. While there is no dearth in willingness to move towards sustainability, cities are investing on more roads to reduce speed but that is also adding to more vehicles in the city. This is not helping in reducing congestion. The focus should be a lot more on public transportation and last mile connectivity as these are the problems ailing cities today.