Smart Mobility 2.0
Smart Mobility 2.0
The urban cities have primarily remained the growth engines generating employment opportunities serving better living standards. Thronged by millions every year the urban centers in India majorly metro cities are home to a population of 78 million people. A population growth of approx. 5% from 2011-12 to 2016-17. Probably 75% of this population use transport for one or the other reason. Though the results of transport sector has not improved any further in the present year, vehicular sales have achieved unprecedented growth, the two wheeler segment has seen tremendous jump in terms of sales number solely in every other metro city.
The E-Mobility advancements in India are getting fast tracked but the possibility of adoption of MaaS should also be given a thought. Just like the govt. started pushing solar energy and forgot about the storage integration. The opportunity of MaaS can be furthered by augmentative policies to accommodate the idea. For example limiting carbon footprints of each vehicle by way of consumption of fuel per month or simply by way of giving carbon credits.
The infrastructure parameters after 5 long years, considering all these years development has remain central attention also the per ca-pita increase of individuals has seen higher levels. But the congestion on the road networks has only risen further. Infrastructure has seen jump in few cities but it cannot go beyond a certain limit as constructing flyover after flyover is not the ultimate solution nor an answer to the already overburdened transport corridors in all the metro cities.
The world has already started moving towards the concept where car ownership tends to be minimum while ride sharing maximizes, MaaS can become an alternate solution for all mobility needs. It is quite evident from the fact that ride sharing has found some solid figures in terms of sales for Ola and Uber in India.
The practicality of adoption of EV fleets of private registered cars allowed to operate in public domain and in turn use the charging infrastructure for free of cost is also probably an option we could look at. The private cars majorly serve as an artifact as they stand grounded 17-18hrs of the day consuming additional individual parking space. The concept could be applied to the ICE vehicles but the more they are on the road the more they pollute.
Adopting MaaS can help in solving a lot of infrastructural overhauling required in each urban city, it only requires a need based approach for identifying various segments of users and mapping their needs to the a specific category of mobility. The possibility of combining the corporations like Delhi metro, Mumbai Metro Chennai Metro, Bangalore metro, Kolkata Metro with their respective state transport corporations is definitely the right approach in this direction. The state transport corporations need to look at this as an opportunity,fleets can be managed by DTC, BMTC, CMTC, KMTC apart from operating Electric Buses. It provides an opportunity for the state corporations to manage fleets operation by way of maintaining electric vehicles with capacity of 7-8 seats additionally to cater to last mile connectivity woes. This segment is still an open opportunity presently being tapped by cab aggregators like Ola, Uber, Lithium, Lyft and others by way of cab hailing, ride sharing platforms.
The dream of putting 30 million additional EV onto the present roads is only going to further aggravate the network congestion. None of the metro have an avg. speed greater than 25km/hr. The energy consumption per day would be around 150 GW could be even more. It’s time we need to look at smarter ways of commuting both saving time and money.
“Smart Grids, Smarter Mobility, Smartest People”