Supreme Court says, Stop Using Cars and get back onto your Bicycle!

If the Supreme Court said it, then it must be right!

Chief Justice of India, SA Bobde, stated in court that “We would like you to stop using your beautiful cars. Which you won’t. We should all go about on bikes — not motorbikes but bicycles“.

Stressing on the fact that vehicular pollution is partly responsible for the horrendous air quality in big cities of north India. The SC pointed out that it is time that members of society need to stop using our big fancy automobiles and get back onto the humble bicycle.

Sadly, even the court knows that this plea will fall on deaf ears, as it said, ‘which you won’t’…

Maybe our leaders from the judiciary, legislature and executive need to lead from the front!

Though this currently might be wishful thinking, but the problem for those who do want to ditch their cars and get commuting on a cycle is safety.

There are no proper bicycle paths for cyclists to get to work. Roads aren’t properly lit, safety for woman in the Indian capital is atrocious.

All these infrastructure challenges make for an extremely difficult life for cyclists who want to commute.

For policy makers, building all this infrastructure without the sign and sight of any cyclist doesn’t make sense. The few experiments of cycling lanes in parts of the country has seen relatively less participation.

Which brings us to classical conundrum of the chicken and the egg. Do you build infrastructure and hope that cyclists use it. Or do cyclists start using the existing roads and hope that the government will built infrastructure for them!

News Source: HT Auto

You can also read the article we did with the Bicycle Mayor of Chennai, Felix John, on his thoughts of how we can tackle this chicken-egg problem.