Jalandhar is a city in Northern India, in the state of Punjab. Like all Indian cities Jalandhar has been in lockdown with everybody inside their homes, but a couple of weeks ago, there was this bright sunny day and the residents of the city went outside onto their roofs, and what they saw was this amazing view of snow-capped mountains—the Himalayas. This view was celebrated all over social media. There are tons of pictures of these mountains on Instagram and TikTok videos of people zooming in on these crisp snow-capped peaks.
This was a big deal because many people were seeing these mountains for the first time. Raghu Karnad wrote about this phenomenon for The New Yorker and he says that because of air pollution, the mountains have been completely obscured for decades. Karnad says that locals think the last time these mountains had been visible had been around 30 years ago.
Link
Now in rural areas I can accept that cars are a necessity, however I really do think there needs to be a major change in urban travel, I'm also thinking a lot of air travel is spurious and polluting. This virus has weirdly given us a view of a world without major pollution, a lot of which, especially at more dangerous ground levels in cities, comes from cars and potentially planes given the proximity of airports to major cities.
Where I live there's no cars, our ambulances look like this: https://imgur.com/a/FwRNF4x
That's right, they're toys run on electricity, same goes for our fire engines and police vehicles, we have electric community vehicles for the elderly and sick, otherwise you're on bicycle or on foot. It's possible.
It's not just emission pollution, it's noise pollution, the rumble, the honking, the beep beep of traffic lights.
From The New Yorker article..
The constancy of car horns in India is legend, a stock line for travel writers. I could never have imagined it possible, in an Indian city, to wake up not to the sounds of traffic but to the sovereignty of bulbuls and mynahs over the morning air. I wonder when an Indian city last felt like this. I wonder when I last felt like this.
In Hong Kong in general there's always been a debate about whether pollution is internal or from China, the result being that little was ever done about it. However this virus has also created unprecedented opportunities for research.
“What we’re seeing now is unprecedented: drops in commercial activity, industrial activity, and transport, all at the same time—not just in a city but, significantly, across a region,” he said. The past few weeks have allowed his team to assess, for example, how responsible a given city is for its air quality. “We do a lot of modelling for every city of how much pollution is local, and how much is coming from the boundary,” he said. “The big cities always point outwards, saying, ‘All my pollution is coming from outside.’ ” Guttikunda’s models had suggested otherwise, and from the first day of the lockdown evidence of cities’ own contributions became clear. “Now we don’t have to blindly say, ‘Look, you are responsible for seventy per cent of your pollution. Please do something about it,’ ” Guttikunda said. “We have that proof.”
70%..
So, should cars simply be banned in cities. I personally think so but then again I am but an atom in the great mind that is the NSG collective.
What think ye
