At the Urban Mobility Conference held in New Delhi early November, Hardeep Singh Puri, Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs, stated that Future Mobility is all about striving towards environment friendly, integrated, automated and personalized travel on-demand. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, India is likely to create behavioural changes in urban mobility. There is opportunity to guide the recovery of urban transport towards long-term development goals. Investment in infrastructure to address more effective circulation and interchange of people and goods will have an economic multiplier effect — both job-creation in the present and boosting growth and productivity in the future. The Ministry has issued a detailed advisory, as to how the nation needs to move ahead in these testing times. It rests on three key pillars, namely, promotion of public transport system, leveraging technological advancements and penetration of NMT systems in the urban transport paradigm. Various studies show that about 16-57% of urban commuters are pedestrian and about 30-40% of commuters use bicycles in the country depending on the size of the city.
