Sustainable urban transportation choices

DEBORAH GORDON of the Energy and Climate program at the Carnegie Endowment and DANIEL SPERLING, director of University of California Davis' Institute of Transportation Studies state that the global proliferation of vehicles presented two alternatives: one where cheap oil, free roads, sprawled development and subsidized home ownership would result in a foreboding car monoculture and an alternative option involving low-carbon, location-efficient, economically productive mobility where  Government, industry, and consumers—especially in emerging economies—could reinvent transportation models and employ innovative solutions. 

In their European Financial Review article "Critical Crossroad: Advancing Global Opportunities to Transform Transportation", they state that the proliferation of automobiles alongwith the the rise of megacities would spur a spiraling motorization process that would result in unhealthy, inefficient, unsustainable cities and crushing financial burdens and advocate an intervention to move away from wasteful transportation system to more sustainable, diverse approach that mimics natural ecosystem with the direct involvement of business, government, and consumers that would transform vehicles, transform fuels, and transform mobility.

They state that transportation could be redesigned as a system and not be bound to a single mode and provide examples of cutting-edge cities which were leading the way on a number of fronts, using strategic policy tools to advance low-carbon mobility.

The Military's Voice

MADHAVI BHASIN,  Visiting Scholar at the Center for South Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley states that the recent media pronouncements by the Indian military chiefs suggested that the armed forces craved a voice in the national strategic dialogue, which has so far been denied to it. In an upcoming article, "Indian Military Seeks a Holistic Role" she highlights recent incidents to buttress her argument that the chiefs of the different military wings have discreetly found ways to counter the prevailing insulation of the Indian military from a holistic role in designing the national defense strategy.