Yonah seems to have gotten a wee bit muddled. But great article, as always. Keep up the good work.

Only two spans have been completed against the target of 23 spans by the end of January 2009.”

The Bangalore Metro may be setback. In India, delays in public infrastructure are a source of predictable frustration.

Thanks so much for your thoughtful and wonderful response to Friedman’s article, and to our project! It’s great to hear from you, and as an organizer of the project that Friedman wrote about, I’m really glad that Yonni called out a major big gap in what Friedman wrote about our journey. While his article was incredible, I’d like to clarify that our trip was not just a five week circus, nor just in electric cars, nor just about youth, nor just about personal mobility, nor just about renewable energy innovation). Our main message throughout the journey was about the multitude of climate solutions and the very simple fact that there is, will be, and can be no single silver bullet to climate change or transportation.

Yonah’s right, personal transport is not the big solution. We begin every discussion of transportation in our leadership trainings focused on public transportation and the need for a multimodal transportation system in every Indian city. I get pretty techy pretty fast on how we can do this, but it IS happening that governments and public-private partnerships are developing transportation networks that can not only provide better transport for those without cars but get people OUT of their cars and into comfortable, safe public transit. We’ve been working along with our partners to develop the multimodal transport networks in Bangalore and driving that through IT companies that can afford to pay for them if they will transport employees.

While in each city we rode and documented the amazing public transportation systems that are so beautiful — the Mumbai train network that carries millions daily through the most chaotic and exquisite transport dance, the CNG autos and the metro in Delhi; the low floor airport buses in Bangalore. These ARE the solutions!

When we called for a global auto revolution at the peak moment of the auto bailout discussions (right at the launch of our tour), we called for a commitment from every global auto maker to sustainable mobility. There is a HUGE market for buses here (electric buses, even!) and for effective transport networks, and IT-enabled payment systems… billions of dollars of green jobs!

The metros that Yonah discusses are meeting the needs of millions (myself and Kartik, included) and are safer, cleaner, and brighter than almost any place in Delhi. I also travel on the buses (but don’t tell my parents or my interim families in Delhi) as they are known to be unsafe both due to drivers and groping gentlemen. Its no wonder, albeit incredibly unfortunate, that so many people want to shift their transport modes. A vicious cycle of air pollution and lack of road safety (both due in major part to increased traffic) make it unpleasant to cycle or ride motorcycles (or even buses/autorickshaws) so those who can afford it are shifting up. Plus, the car as a status
symbol remains as big an issue here as in the US (Hummer phenomenon).

We are trying to change that in big and small ways.

As with so many of the solutions we were trying to highlight, many traditional ways of life in India are more sustainable than the greenest American — from traditional Rajasthani building design to mixed use urban developments (Dharavi, or many other informal developments still show this); from clay cups for chai (now plastic!) to vegetarianism as a cultural norm. A big focus in our work here is to profile the solutions that do and did exist and to bring dignity and pride back to them. Plastic cups are not a sign of progress and nor is a car.

So, why did we drive in solar electric cars and call them solutions if we love metros and trains and traditional ways of getting around? We did partner with Vinay Jaju, who rode his bike from Kolkata to Delhi on cycle to visit coal mines in India and promote the global campaign “Why New Coal?” We also wanted to reach dozens of cities in a short period of time. And train journeys are beautiful (the next road tour may be by train of our own) but as almost everyone in India travels by train daily, our journey did not seem much different from our daily lives (travelling India by rail to go to universities) by doing that.

We wanted a mode of transportation that would catch attention for this cause – create a story, and then get a message out there. As a big part of our campaign is to profile India’s climate solutions that should drive and inspire the world, the Reva – designed and built in Bangalore – is inspiring. The solar power, I’ll admit, was to demonstrate and show people solar cells when they often haven’t seen PV up close. We NEVER spoke about the solar cars as a global transport
solution, we instead saw them as an example of Indian innovation — an opportunity for India to export high quality goods to places that do need them or can use them.

This is a big lesson that nations like India need to see before
Copenhagen – that Indian climate innovation will and can be exported to the green-hungry nations that are legally or morally bound to dramatically reduce their carbon emissions. If India and India’s entrepreneurs sees this, they will be much more likely to invest time and money into clean tech development HERE. That includes clean tech for public mobility, for sure. We wanted to inspire young people to start thinking about solutions — and sometimes it takes starting with a sexier solution to draw them in before we start talking about bigger things like reducing transmissions losses in electrical wires or capturing waste heat from power plants…

In our press releases, press conferences, and presentations, we always emphasized that we were not saying that everyone should have a Reva — it doesn’t solve any traffic or climate change right now. But we are saying people should look at it — the world should look at the relevance of electric vehicles for where individual mobility IS needed. The postal department in Kerala (an Eastern state) uses Revas
for all mail delivery. Anna University uses Revas on campus to
transport elderly professors as internal combustion engines are banned inside the large campus.

Kartik and I both did change our minds a lot that there even is a
space for electric cars in the solutions spectrum (I honestly
questioned even that before the tour). But as we transition to more dense and better designed cities (the biggest solution, Yonni’s right) we’ll still have people in oversized petrol or diesel cars that don’t need them. I guess I don’t see electric cars as a New Yorker’s solution (or a Delhiite’s or Mumbaiker’s solution). It’s a solution for New Haven’s periphery, for London boroughs. We wont be able to provide metros or buses even to these less dense areas, but we can connect them.

Again, as for the solar, its not really relevant in market analysis,
but Friedman loves solar, so he talked about the solar cars. I love green bulidings’ and plastic reduction, so that’s what I talk about when I talk about solutions. I hope you’ll take his article with a few grains of salt, and recognize that we agree!

Thanks for talking about this Yonah. It’s great to see these cities taking action, and we hope to use them as models for all Indian Tier 1 and 2 cities planning for people rather than for cars.

Hope to see you soon!!!