The state of West Bengal, of which Calcutta is the capital, declared its
intention in October 1996 to ban rickshaws, cycle rickshaws and hand-pulled
carts from a large area of central Calcutta. It plans to build six concrete
flyovers to relieve congestion at crowded intersections, and to close tram
routes wherever they cross congested streets. Air pollution in Calcutta now
reaches levels undreamt of in most European or North American cities. Now the
city faces even higher levels of environmental chaos, wished on it in large part
by the comfortable citizenries, companies and governments of the developed
world.

Calcutta’s existing tram system, which will be disrupted by the changes, is
excellent and produces little pollution. But it is sorely starved of funds and
carries only 20 per cent of the city’s passengers. The bus services are in a
much worse state, they are desperately overcrowded and cause serious levels of
pollution.

Together, Calcutta’s underground system, tram network and its various
waterways could make the city’s transport system one of the most sustainable in
the world. (Sustainable in the sense that it would minimise emissions of
greenhouse gases and health-damaging pollutants while satisfying basic everyday
demands for access and mobility.) But, sadly, where Calcutta could be a role
model for the rest of the world, it now looks likely to become a victim of the
rise of the car.

It will be the very opposite of what a sustainable transport system is
supposed to be. Many of Calcutta’s poorest citizens will be deprived of their
livelihood and the people who have to spend their days on the streets will have
to endure even more pollution. Those who suffer the most from the diseases of
poverty will be the ones to experience the most intense noise and air pollution
from increased levels of traffic.

The explanation for this dramatic shift lies partly within the city and
partly outside it. In Calcutta there is a strong desire to motorise. India has a
large, well-off middle class and cars are high on the list of desirable consumer
goods. The government at all levels is obsessed with cars. Every “senior”
official has a “duty” car and a driver, which are seen as a badge of status.

To a casual observer on the roof of the Writer’s Building, headquarters of
the West Bengal state government, the scene below is a chaotic tangle of trams,
rickshaws, carts and other traffic. The idea of removing the trams and anything
that uses human power, and building new roads, flyovers and car parks, might
seem to promise a new era of ordered calm. The reality is different.

West Bengal is almost bankrupt. The Communist-controlled state government is
at loggerheads with the central administration in Delhi, and does badly when
funds are being handed out. Now a new factor has arrived in the form of overseas
aid from Japan. The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) has proposed
and arranged the finance for six new flyovers, one of which will be 2.3
kilometres long. The cost will be of the order of 1.75 billion rupees (about
ÂŁ29 million). It is cheap by Western standards but represents a greater
investment than the tram system has seen in the past 20 years. The benefits will
be to a small number of Calcutta’s car owners (5 per cent of its population).
The JICA’s proposals also involve the construction of 2322 car parking places,
some on the Esplanade, which is currently the site of the tram terminus.

West Bengal has agreed to the plan, seemingly with little consideration of
how it will affect noise levels for the thousands of dwellings in the shadow of
the flyovers. Nor has it assessed the effects of the extra traffic it will
generate or the pollution that traffic will cause. No alternatives have been
proposed to improve public transport, or the lot of pedestrians or cyclists.
What’s more, the scheme will break up the tram system.

The flyover proposals have gained approval just at the moment when India is
gearing up, under pressure from global car manufacturers and its own financial
institutions to increase its car manufacturing capacity. Ford opened its first
car plant in India in 1996 and the Korean company Daewoo has also started
manufacturing cars locally. Car sales are growing at about 26 per cent a year.
This expansion in the nation’s car fleet is putting the country’s infrastructure
under so much pressure that the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and
the Pacific held its ministerial conference in Delhi last October to discuss
targets for adding 2 million kilometres of new roads in the region.

Western models of consumption, aggressively marketed by a global car
manufacturing industry, may well destroy the city. Although there is a strong
local component of culpability in this, the resources to bring about mass car
ownership come from abroad and will require considerable sacrifices by way of
part payment from within India. The sacrificial victims will include Calcutta’s
historic buildings, the livelihood of its poorest citizens, the health of
everyone and the Indian economy, which will have to pay for oil imports to fuel
the process.

For example, a 7300-kilometre motorway hugging the coast from Tobruk
to Senegal is planned for North Africa, with a fixed link across the Strait
of Gibraltar to connect Europe to a new African motorway system.

Alain Dupont, president of the International Road Federation in Geneva,
whose brainchild all this is, cannot be accused of not thinking big. He
regards the ‘Motorway to Unity in Magreb’, or MUM, as an integral part of
a motorway around the whole Mediterranean coast with links to sub-Saharan
Africa through a connection with the Trans-Saharan route. And it is more
than a plan. A $500 000 pre-feasibility study has already begun and
a meeting was held in Morocco in 1992 to sort out financial backing for
the project.

It would seem unlikely that the careful deliberations and planning of
the IRF, a lobby organisation, were disturbed by thoughts of emissions,
noise, carbon dioxide and global warming, the conservation value of the
North African coast, or the thousands of lorries trundling through Europe
on the way to the Gibraltar crossing and African countries. It would seem
equally implausible that the planners gave other than passing thought to
the social and development needs of all sections of the population of North
Africa and sub-Saharan Africa as they planned for billions of dollars of
expenditure on something that can only benefit the wealthier members of
society. The MUM will cost $500 million a year over 30 years, possibly
to be funded by tolls. It will be essential, therefore, to get developments
in place, particularly tourism, cash crops and mineral exploitation for
richer countries, to generate the traffic to pay the tolls to pay for the
motorway.

In Mexico, a national highway programme calls for the building of 6000
kilometres of new highway which, according to the IRF, makes Mexico currently
the world’s biggest road builder. Six major axes radiating from Mexico City
were planned and 3205 kilometres were completed by February 1993. It is
intended that by the time the current administration comes to an end later
this year, Mexico will have a motorway network of 10 000 kilometres and
17 international crossings, including four new international bridges to
the US. This scale of activity is expensive and has cost $6 billion to
date and will cost a further $9 billion to complete.

Mexico’s highway building will add enormous quantities of pollution
to Mexico City, one of the world’s most polluted urban areas, and will ensure
that any global and regional plans to reduce carbon emissions from the transport
sector are rendered virtually useless. The highway investment is, however,
good news for construction firms and for all the members of the IRF.

The IRF in its September 1993 bulletin announced more good news. St
Petersburg, it declares, is inaccessible because of a lack of motorways
connecting it to the outside world. The federation is to sponsor a symposium
to discuss this ‘infrastructure problem’. Infrastructure problems viewed
in this narrow way boil down to Napoleonic planning – finding gaps on large-scale
maps of the world and filling them in with new highways. There is little
evidence to suggest that anyone in the IRF is thinking about the heritage
and conservation issues surrounding the building of these highways, that
will act as conveyor belts, pouring tens of thousands of vehicles a day
into urban areas that don’t have enough parking space for them. There is
even less evidence that the powerful IRF and its friends in national governments
understand the meaning of sustainability or the need to develop local transport
links rather than superhighways stretching thousands of kilometres.

The collapse of the centrally planned economies in Eastern Europe and
the former Soviet Union provides rich pickings for global road builders.
Each of these countries has plans for new highways, advanced at great expense
as their national railway systems deteriorate. Funds are flowing into these
countries on an unprecedented scale under the guise of economic restructuring
encouraged by international bodies such as the European Union and the recently
widely discredited European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The
EBRD, for example, is heavily involved in funding motorway construction
in Eastern Europe. Recent projects include the Pilzen-German Border Motorway,
at a cost of 400 million Ecus, and the East-West Highway project in Slovenia,
at a cost of 125 million Ecus. These lavish projects are part of an economic
transformation which is fostering a greater dependency on cars and lorries
and hence even more demand for new road infrastructure. Countries such as
Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia are converting their economies into
production systems based on roads – at the very moment the West has come
to realise the enormity of the problems that this creates.

The European Commission has its own plans for 12 500 kilometres of new
highways, including several in Britain, a policy that blasts the Commission’s
environmental credentials out of the water. The European Round Table of
Industrialists (ERT), representing the largest of Europe’s businesses, has
consistently pressed for major infrastructure projects even though they
conflict with environmental goals. And as, in the case of the new bridge
connecting Sweden with Denmark, they can involve considerable disruption
to densely populated areas. The new bridge, the Oresund Link, is associated
with large-scale motorway construction on both the Swedish and Danish sides
with the new motorway cutting through the southern suburbs of Copenhagen
and new roads planned in the vicinity of Malmo and Lund in Sweden.

The transport and environment debate in Britain has made a great deal
of headway in the past 12 months but so, unfortun-ately, has the road-building
programme, encouraged by the commitment of all main political parties to
the ‘roads means jobs’ argument. At the international level, the scale of
road construction threatens to wipe out gains made by improvements in public
transport and land-use planning in many European cities. This is an inevitable
consequence of political parties, national governments and the international
institutions manipulating the rhetoric of environmental concern. From every
level of government – the European Union, the British government and local
authorities such as Lancashire County Council – come strong environmental
policy statements emphasising the need to conserve the countryside, reduce
carbon dioxide emissions and reduce pollution. The European Union’s Fifth
Environmental Action Programme, Britain’s Sustainable Development Strategy
and Lancashire County Council’s Greening the Red Rose County, all proclaim
strong environmental imperatives. Yet each of these levels of government
also supports road construction involving damage to sensitive habitats and
contributing to an increase in carbon dioxide emissions in a way that is
clearly at variance with sustainable development objectives. For example,
Britain will be unable to meet its targets to reduce carbon dioxide levels.
The road building runs alongside a merely superficial and politically expedient
commitment to environmental objectives – ideal terrain for the big battalions
of the IRF and the ERT.

Little seems to stand in the way of this global road mania. Equally,
there can be no doubt that the growth of traffic and road construction represent
two of the biggest threats to global sustainability and an activity well
on course for even greater growth and destruction in the future.

John Whitelegg is managing director of Eco-Logica, Lancaster, an independent
transport and environment consultancy.