At rush hour, the gridlock on a highway in Delhi, India, looks a lot like Los Angeles. As more Indians are able to afford cars–and as the country’s population soon becomes the largest in the world–traffic and pollution throughout the country could be set to become much, much worse. But the government has decided to try to develop in a radically different direction than America, avoiding further sprawl and car-dependency. By the end of next decade, it wants most–if not all–vehicles in India to run on electricity, most cars to be shared, and cities to be designed for humans rather than cars.
If successful, the shift would save the country $60 billion in diesel and gas costs in 2030. Instead of 170 million cars, the number expected with the current trajectory, there would be 77 million. CO2 emissions from passenger transport would drop 37% compared to the business-as-usual scenario; energy use in passenger transport would drop 64%.
No Time Like The Present
“We think there’s this window of opportunity that is fleeting, but also very real, for India to be in a more advantageous position than any other nation that we know of to leapfrog the internal combustion engine, private vehicle ownership model that a lot of other countries are trying to undo,” says Clay Stranger, a principal at Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit that is working with the Indian government to strategize about how to reach that goal through a long series of steps, such as a gas car tax to help fund the construction of charging stations for electric cars.
India has already “leapfrogged” Western technology in other ways. In the early 1990s, 0.05% of the population had access to a phone. When the country wanted to expand access, instead of building landlines, it encouraged the growth of mobile phones. By 2016, there were more than 1 billion mobile subscribers. Some remote Indian villages have gained access to electricity through solar panels rather than building traditional power plants.
The country’s current situation lends itself to the shift to sustainable mobility. In Indian cities now, most trips are made by foot, bike, or public transit. That’s largely because people can’t afford to drive–but encouraging people to continue current habits is easier than changing habits in a car-dependant city. Only 18 out of 1,000 people own a car, versus 786 out of 1,000 in the United States. That also makes the full transition to electric cars easier, as there are fewer gas cars on the road that need to be replaced. Shared transportation is also already widely accepted.
“The prevalence of shared mobility is completely accepted, used, and normalized in India,” says Stranger. “In some ways, you could almost argue it was invented there out of necessity. Auto-rickshaws that drive semi-fixed routes picking up passengers and dropping them off at not-predetermined stops as people need to board or get off . . . have been a part of Indian life for at least the last century. Before that, it was bicycle rickshaws.”
The Future Is Electric
As incomes rise in India and more people buy cars (car ownership has tripled over the last decade) it coincides with global changes in both technology and new business models for transportation such as ride hailing. The cost of battery packs for electric cars has dropped 80% in the last six years. In January of 2017, 37% of the cars sold in Norway were electric. In Japan, there are now more electric charging stations than gas stations.