In the opening panel yesterday we gathered some really interesting, if not baffling statistics about the world-wide evolution of mobility.
From our friends of Sasahivi media in Nairobi we heard that it now takes them two to three hours every day to go from home to work, and they often leave very early or very late to avoid rush hour traffic. We then asked them what distance they had to cover and they explained that it was just under 3 km (!).
Architect Daan Roggeveen then connected with us from Xi’an international airport and explained that in their recent studies of Wuhan more than 500 new cars hit the streets in China. We asked him how many cities of comparable size exist now in China, and he thought about 30. Simple calculation then tells us that about 15.000 new cars hit the road every single day in China.
Then we talked to filmmaker Aarti Sethi in Delhi, and she explained that in Delhi similar things are going on, especially since the introduction of the Tata, the Indian equivalent of the Volkswagen. In Delhi the estimate is that about a thousand new cars hit the road each day.
We can be brief – this is not sustainable.