Automobility and the challenge for transport planning

Keywords: Automobility, Mobilities, Transport planning, Metrorail
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

The continuing dominance of automobility in Southern cities is steeped in historical processes of car-centric policymaking and reordering of streets. In Indian cities, these processes commenced with the unfortunate problematizing of organic ways of animating the street prior to its current overtly motorized state that privileges the automobile subject at the expense of other nonmotorized bodies. As a result, many cities suffer from debilitating congestion, with high social, economic and environmental costs. In response, policy makers have deployed a bouquet of transnationally mobile transport planning solutions such as metrorail systems, often disregarding the local and microlocal particularities of the city. Shorn of integrated land use-transport planning, feeder services and strict parking regulations that are critical to their success elsewhere, such solutions face grave challenges in offering a coherent, reliable and practical alternative to the private automobile. Kochi’s metrorail system, an assemblage of several transport planning solutions, has garnered attention as an early adopter of the recommendations of India’s progressive transport policy of 2006. However, the continuance of several vestiges of conventional transport planning present familiar roadblocks. Using a combination of key person interviews, participant observation and ride-alongs, I argue that any tenable challenge to the automobility regime demands the coming together of a multitude of central, state and city agencies with local and micro-local actors whose voices are currently lost in the positivist discourses encouraged by transnational policy agents.