Is Auroville becoming a city of cars?

Once upon a time, Auroville was a sleepy outpost comprised of dirt tracks and bullock carts. The pioneer Aurovilians moved around on cycles, carts or on foot. Motor vehicles were rarely seen, except for the Auroville shuttle bus that plied to Pondy and back. As new work areas were established throughout the landscape, Aurovilians started moving around more to accomplish multiple tasks or attend meetings, and the need to ‘save time’ felt more imperative.  Motorbikes were becoming more common across India in the 1980s and 90s, yet many Aurovilians initially resisted the pull to buy one, in the belief that motorised transport was against the community’s ethos. 

“From what I have heard, people were initially embarrassed to own a motorbike,” says David, an architect who also explores issues of urban planning in Auroville, “but after some time there was a critical mass of Aurovilians with motorbikes, and suddenly it was not taboo anymore. And unfortunately, we’ve more recently passed the same point with cars. In the last two years, it has suddenly become no longer embarrassing to own a car in Auroville. If this keeps going on, we’ll have a township with 50,000 cars, and we’ll all be sitting in traffic.”  

There are now at least 250 cars belonging to individuals in Auroville, which means about 15 to 30 percent of adult residents are car owners, according to Chandresh from Auroville’s Integrated Transport Service. Aurovilians who previously kept their cars hidden under dense foliage in order to avoid community disapproval no longer feel the need to do so, and many communities now have four or five cars parked at their gates.  

Mathew, who lives in Sunship community behind Town Hall, recounts how his community’s car parking area has been enlarged twice in the last two years, a process which involved the bulldozing of a dozen or more trees. The second time, Mathew tried to blockade the bulldozer, but the clearing continued as soon he left. “There was no consultation with our [Sunship] community about that,” he says. Mathew points to the irony of a big signboard outside his community’s entrance that clearly states that “no motorised vehicles” are allowed into a community which includes several car owners. 

While some of these privately-owned cars in Auroville are electric, the vast majority of them run on fossil fuels. As fossil fuel vehicles are polluting and harmful to the environment, many community members deem them to be contrary to Auroville’s values concerning ecology and human consciousness. Added to that are the harmful effects and discomfort of noise and dust pollution.

Given that Auroville has a reputation as being a progressive place that implements innovative solutions for so many development issues, why has Auroville dropped the ball on mobility and transport? 

How did we get here?

When Roger Anger developed the Galaxy Model for Auroville under the Mother’s guidance, they were both aiming for a townscape where pedestrians and slow-moving collective transport would be prioritised. According to some architects’ interpretations, roads are not visible in the final Galaxy Model – in contrast to the earlier rejected models. [See interview with David on page 3].

Roger wrote at the time (1965) that he wanted to “suppress” the “tyranny” of cars, which he claimed created “infernos within cities”. While in the later Master Plan (2001) he alluded to a restricted use of roads (for example, vehicles moving at 15kmh to do deliveries at a certain time each day in certain areas), he  continued to state that pedestrian movement had “absolute priority”, and that Auroville should be “a city free of pollution by motorised vehicles”. However, Roger did not provide any detailed plan regarding mobility and transport, nor how the city’s development would manage the movement of people and materials required to undertake construction. And over the years, no mobility plan for Auroville has ever been finalised and agreed upon as a step towards successful implementation. As a result, the ‘bones’ of the Galaxy Plan blueprint have been translated and implemented as roads. Now that parts of the Crown and other routes have been created as wide paved roads, increasing numbers of motorised vehicles have followed. 

In this trajectory towards more roads and cars in the last decade, it seems that Auroville has fallen well behind global ‘best practice’ examples of transport and mobility, such as in Scandinavian cities. It must be conceded that Auroville has its own complexities that pose challenges to the development of mobility and transport: for example, land ownership issues mean that Auroville does not own key pieces of land that are necessary to create flowing routes of passage for pedestrians or vehicles; and the population is still short of a certain critical mass that is generally required to begin implementation of a public transport system.

While conceding these difficulties, Auroville – a town that advises ‘Smart Cities’ in India on urban planning – has not lived up to its own progressive reputation when it comes to solutions on mobility and transport. According to a 2017 survey undertaken by Accessible Bus Service, as well as the 236 individually owned cars, Auroville had at least 85 taxis and a few buses then. Aurovilians own about 1400 fossil-fuel two-wheelers, and travel an average 20 kilometres per day inside the city area, spending about Rs 960 each per month on petrol. Given that Auroville’s diameter is 2.5 km (the city circle within the Outer Ring Road) and can be crossed by foot within 35 minutes, this is a strong dependency on motorised vehicles for a relatively small geographical area. While some new measures are in motion to address the issue (detailed further below), Auroville seems to have fallen into the wider trap of unrestrained private ownership of individual vehicles, especially fossil fuel cars.

Min, who operates Auroville’s Integrated Transport Service (ITS), points out how the normalisation of private car ownership in wider India has started to shape attitudes and habits in Auroville amongst the long-timers as well as newcomers. “Some of the pioneers have become tired over time of the tough life, especially in summer, and they want a bit of comfort in moving around,” he says. “Some of these people have shifted to four wheelers. And people who come to Auroville for the first time see some four-wheelers moving around, and assume that’s normal. They then assume that it is acceptable if they have a car, too.”

Min points to an inherent tension within people in Auroville. On the one hand, we aspire to live a more conscious ethical lifestyle. But on the other hand, as human beings, “we operate in certain mental frames” that are individualistic. He points to a tussle in his own community of Maitreye, where some residents want to build individual garages for their private cars. “It’s an interesting phenomenon: how people weigh the cost of personal convenience against the collective commons.” Min’s colleague Chandresh chimes in that individual garages in Auroville go “against the total sincerity of the project of Auroville, and the world movement in mobility” that aims to reduce humans’ environmental footprint. Car owners in Auroville often feel that they have their own exceptional reasons to own a car. The common rationales generally include: to transport children or an elderly parent with poor mobility; an injury, disability or mobility issue; the need to go to Pondicherry regularly to buy supplies for a business unit; the need to travel interstate for work or to visit relatives; to protect oneself from rain or to move quickly through intense heat; the need to be protected from increasingly dangerous roads, etc.

But as Auroville’s transport and urban planning pandits point out, this collective rise in private ownership has had significant negative impacts on the environment and quality of life. They argue that Auroville needs to provide effective collective solutions that will circumvent or dilute people’s individualistic rationales for owning a car.

And the recent increase in cars in Auroville – particularly fossil-fuel cars – suggests that alternative solutions need to be implemented quickly.  “It’s urgent because of accidents, deaths, noise, traffic,” says Christian, Chairman of AVI Canada and the Auroville International Board, who proposes a new public transport system. “Now that part of the Crown is laid, many communities in the Residential Zone, like Kalpana, Humanscapes and Surrender, are disturbed by the traffic noise. And old people don’t want to go out because it’s dangerous. There should be a change of habits, a change of culture.” “If we don’t nip it [private car use] in the bud now, it could be too late,” says David, “assuming, of course, that it isn’t already.”

Existing transport services

Auroville has experienced something of a small boom in public transport options in the last couple of years, but the community’s transport experts point to the need to build upon these in order to create a more comprehensive approach to quiet, green and reliable forms of public transport. The trusty Accessible Bus continues to transport Aurovilians to Pondicherry each day, and the Shared Taxi Service scheme to Chennai airport has had great uptake since it started three years ago. However, these two options – as well as Auroville’s larger buses that ferry children to school and visitors between Visitors’ Centre and the Matrimandir – all run on fossil fuels. Two more recently-introduced emission-free public transport services have been greeted with much enthusiasm within Auroville: the electric vans provided by City Transport and ITS (although these services have not been operating under lockdown).

City Transport has been running a pick up and drop service for Aurovilians and guests since 2012, based at the Visitors Centre. In 2018 the petrol vehicles were replaced with electric vans thanks to funding for Auroville’s 50th anniversary. The vans are available on-call, free-of-charge, for destinations within the city area. They are much appreciated by Aurovilians and guests who are not able to ride two-wheelers due to age, injury or to feeling unsafe on the roads. They are also available to visitors who leave their vehicles in the parking lot and need to reach their appointments inside the city area. The organisers of the Film Festival arranged for the vans to shuttle visitors from a specified parking area to the event venue – prefiguring the envisaged scheme when all arriving vehicles will be parked at the edge of the city and passengers will proceed into Auroville on internal transport options.

ITS runs a similar eco-friendly service for Aurovilians and guests, with its two electric vans based at the Solar Kitchen. Aurovilians and guests can call for pick-up and drop services, mostly within the city centre, but also down to the ECR and back, and to Pondy. ITS executive Min points to the “tremendous” response from Aurovilians to the on-call pick-up/drop service, for which users can contribute what they wish. A certain number of the users are Aurovilians who have broken limbs in motorbike accidents and cannot temporarily drive their own vehicles. “It’s always booked, people love it,” Min says, noting that the positive demand has sparked ITS to purchase an electric auto to add to its public transport fleet. 

While the Covid-19 pandemic will possibly affect income streams that support these public transport initiatives in the near future, the ‘big picture’ shift from fossil fuel towards electric technology has also increasingly shaped individual Aurovilians’ personal transport choices of late. There have been recent “dramatic” improvements in electric vehicle technology, such as the Tesla car or electric buses in China, says Min, which place Auroville in a “super exciting” position to make progress. While Auroville has conducted its own experiments in making electric two-wheelers in the past – most notably by the unit EvFuture – at that stage, it was not viable for Auroville to move towards mass production, so EvFuture ceased making the bikes around 2010. Since then, says Min, “the two-wheeler electric cycle trajectory has come to a point where it’s attractive in India.” This technological progress has sparked ITS into the purchase of 29 electric scooters and 10 e-cycles, which it hires out to the Aurovilians and guests, and ITS has also established charging points at five public and guesthouse locations in Auroville.

Auroville unit Kinisi e-Mobility is also capitalising on the improvements in electric technology to manifest its vision of shared sustainable mobility for all. From its base in CSR, Kinisi offers sustainable, “comfortable, silent and emissionless” transport to all Auroville residents, volunteers and guests, thanks to a fleet of 250 electric bicycles to date. Kinisi operates two models of usage: daily hire basis for guests, or the increasingly popular KIM (Kinisi In-kind Mobility) monthly membership scheme for Aurovilians and Newcomers, which provides an electric bicycle for a monthly contribution that covers maintenance, repairs and battery replacement. Currently, 125 Aurovilians are using this scheme that offers the advantages of ownership without its accompanying hassles. Kinisi plans to expand its fleet to include electric scooters, offering these to Aurovilians who occasionally need to switch to a vehicle with more range or carrying capacity for half a day. [See AV Today # 362, September 2019 for more about Kinisi e-Mobility.]

In tandem with the growth in electric vehicle use in Auroville, the humble cycle has also experienced a surge in interest. This can be linked to two factors: the quiet shady cycle path network which has been developed over the last thirty years by Auroville’s cycle enthusiasts; and the presence of Aurovelo, the Auroville unit dedicated to cycling culture and the sale of high-quality cycles. Cycle rentals are also now available for guests and day visitors at Town Hall, Ganesh Bakery and Visitors Centre, and these are always fully booked in the tourist season. 

While all of these two-wheeler and on-call van services have seen enthusiastic uptake in the last couple of years, there is still a perceived need to expand the current status quo in Auroville and to create a comprehensive environmentally-friendly public transport system.

La nAVette – a proposed public transport system

La nAVette is a public shuttle service proposed by the team responsible for the Auroville Accessible Bus (which runs between Pondy and Auroville twice a day) and one of the bus’s sponsors, AVI Canada. Team members Christian, Raju, Sauro and Susmita point out that a regular electric shuttle service supports Mother’s vision for collective transport for Auroville. They believe that the model of the existing electric van services (ITS, City Transport) – which must be ordered by phone in advance – poses a barrier to community members who may be too shy to call, or who phone only to find the vans are booked. They argue that a regular electric shuttle bus is much more likely to encourage community members to drop their tendencies towards individual transport. “When it is frequent and reliable,” says Raju, “people can trust that if they wait at the right time, it will come.”

The La nAVette concept – navette is French for shuttle – is to have electric vans plying regularly on three key routes. The first route will circle inside the city and include stops at 20 communities along the way. The vans will circle in both directions every 30 minutes, which means that waiting passengers can reach their destination by going in either direction and would have to wait for no more than 15 minutes. Timetables will be widely available, and would also be posted at every bus stop.

The other two routes would serve people travelling from the bioregion into Auroville or vice-versa: one route from the East Coast Road (ECR) to Certitude, and the other from the highway tollgate (on JIPMER side) to the Visitors Centre. These bioregion routes would aim to bring passengers to Certitude or the Visitors’ Centre, where they would transfer to the city circle shuttle to move around inside Auroville. These routes would address the problem of guests and Aurovilians with mobility issues who use outside autos to take them grocery shopping in Kuilapalyam and then drop them home again. Raju notes that this is “more than a habit”, saying that while the noisy polluting autos are discouraged from entering Auroville, guards have “no option” but to let autos through when they see an Aurovilian or guest sitting inside.

Christian and Raju believe that a regular shuttle service will provide a viable alternative. They point out that many Aurovilians currently feel compelled to use individual transport options to keep appointments and do shopping, because there is no comprehensive public transport system. They hope La nAVette will encourage a significant change in practices, emphasising that the service will be accessible to people in wheelchairs, and will meet the definitions of a public transport system by being regular, reliable and frequent, as well as quiet and green. The shuttle could also possibly deliver shopping baskets to elderly people.

While the project will be “quite affordable,” the team has to raise the funds as they ultimately want to make the service free. “Auroville talks a lot about mobility, but financially they give zero,” says Raju, who explains that the team will apply for Government of India funds.

ITS – a proposed public transport system

The plan evolved by the ITS team (Min, Lakshman, Chandresh) for the expansion of public transport in Auroville is inspired by cities in Europe that have established progressive well-integrated transport systems. “The idea is to create a system which enables mobility to become a service,” says Min, “not a tangible physical item that you have to own.”  In ITS’s proposed scheme, users can opt into different schemes for a small monthly contribution, which will enable them to fulfil all their mobility needs on different kinds of electric vehicles.

This may include use of an electric cycle for daily life, access to an electric scooter to do shopping or go out in the evenings, and occasional use of an auto or taxi to go to Pondy or Chennai airport. “There is flexibility for the user to use the funds in any of these ways,” says Min, noting that some people prefer to be on cycles most of the time, while others want to use a taxi three times a week. “They can switch up and down. For example, if my parents are in town, then I can use more taxi rides. In this model, you don’t own anything, which means if something breaks down, you just bring it to the service centre and get a new one. The users don’t have to deal with repairs or insurance, and at no time are they without 

a vehicle.”

Min points to the way in which transport apps in many cities enable users to access different kinds of transport at different times, and informs them about how to connect from one form of transport to another: “I feel that we can leverage this technology to take it to the next level in Auroville.”

Min’s aim is to encourage everyone in Auroville to start moving towards more sustainable local modes of transport, which means using two-wheelers and electric transport wherever possible, and limiting cars inside Auroville. “Removing four-wheeler vehicles, except collective transport and emergency vehicles, is a no-brainer,” says Min’s colleague Chandresh. To remove four-wheelers, Min and Chandresh aim to create a large parking hub with charging points in the service area near Certitude, where residents and guests can ‘park and ride’. In other words, people can park their individual cars in a guarded secure space, and take public transport or two-wheelers to their guesthouse or home inside Auroville. When coming from inside Auroville, community members can leave their two-wheeler to charge at the hub, and take a bus or their own car into Pondicherry. (Raju and the La nAVette team propose a similar concept for a transport interchange hub.)

When Aurovilians get down from public transport, how can they manage ‘the last mile problem’ of travelling from the bus stop to their destination?  Urban planners around the world are forced to address this phenomenon. If there’s no straight-forward transport option for people to travel the last mile to the office or home, this is the point at which individuals begin to justify their need for a private vehicle. 

Min points out that this issue can be solved relatively easily inside Auroville with electric cycles or scooters, but it poses a greater problem for Aurovilians who need to move around inside Pondicherry. “So I’m thinking to collaborate with the Ashram, to have a parking spot there with some electric cycles or scooters for us to use within Pondy. I think everyone should take the bus to Pondicherry, which should make multiple trips per day. But that will only happen if the last mile is sorted.”

Min claims Auroville is a fertile ground to experiment with electric transport. “Auroville has many early adopters, risk takers, people who’ll try things.”  While Auroville has been experimenting with electric mobility since the 1970s, Min acknowledges there are still a few “scars” from the early experiments, undertaken at a time when the technology was not sufficiently developed. From this experience, “we know how it works, where it fails,” he says. And the recent global progress in electric vehicle technology means that electric two-wheelers are now a more viable option for Aurovilians. “In about six months, it’ll be incredible. You’ll get electric scooters for around Rs70,000 with good power, that can go up to 100km on one charge. That means you can go to Pondy and back to Auroville, and then to Kuilapalyam, and not even think about charging the battery. You can safely wait until night to charge it.”

ITS is in a good position to advocate for new mobility options, given the success of its Shared Transport Service which it implemented three years ago. Min explains that the STS ride-share model to Chennai challenges conventional thinking that a taxi business will lose money if it does not prioritise individual use of taxis. “We turned the whole thinking upside down, so that ITS makes more money if people share,” he says.  

However, Min’s larger plans for transport expansion – particularly for the parking hub near Certitude – have hit the usual Auroville bureaucratic roadblocks. “The parking hub application has been sitting with L’Avenir for two-and-a-half years for consideration. We made so many presentations. I can’t tell you how frustrating this has been.” A grant provided by Auroville’s 50th birthday was cut down “because of in-fighting” says Min, meaning that ITS could not install as many charging stations as planned, or obtain as many pick-up/drop electric vans. “Auroville was created with this vision that we’d be able to find solutions for humanity. This is our chance. We’re talking with Pondicherry City, they’re very keen to collaborate on this experiment. If we can replicate what we’re doing here in Pondy, imagine the impact and blueprint we can create. We can show other cities how to do it.”

Sparking competition to create solutions for the future 

The various transport initiatives – La nAVette, ITS, City Transport, Kinisi – clearly have some overlap. At the moment, visitors are sometimes confused about having to liaise with different providers in different places for their different needs: electric scooter hire (ITS at Solar Kitchen); electric cycle hire (Kinisi at CSR); cycle hire (Town Hall, Visitors Centre and Ganesh Bakery); electric van pick-up and drop service (City Transport at Visitors’ Centre; ITS at Solar Kitchen; share taxi (STS at Solar Kitchen); and the daily Accessible Bus to Pondicherry. Understandably, people are sometimes unsure which service is which.

Min suggests that all the players should “come under one umbrella”, and have one phone number or app for all these services. “For the end consumer, it should be a seamless service. That’s a no-brainer.  It can be multiple services at the back end, but it should seem like one service to the user. I think it’s time to overcome any differences, and to think about benefitting the commons.”

Min and David both point to the merits of having different players addressing the same problem because it sparks innovation. “That bubbling creativity that takes place at the beginning of things is actually good,” David says. “A bit of competition and tension sparks creativity. People are trying out different ways of doing it, and we’re moving in the right direction.”

All the above transport initiatives emphasise the use of electric vehicles, and are based on the common belief that electric vehicles are more environmentally-friendly than vehicles that operate on fossil fuels. But there are also concerns about the problem of batteries for electric vehicles: namely, that they contain toxic materials, are made under exploitative labour conditions in developing countries, and are not easily recyclable. 

Min weighs up the pros and cons of electric technology versus fossil fuel vehicles.

“The first issue is that fossil fuel is a limited resource – it’s going to run out,” says Min. “It’s extractive. And fossil fuels produce emissions from the tail pipes of cars.” Min points out that fossil fuel technology has been around now for about 100 years, and has evolved to its most efficient possible state. “It’s not going to become more efficient at reducing pollution, or more efficient in mileage.”

He contrasts this stagnation in fossil fuel’s technological progress with the “phenomenal” innovation taking place in battery research. “A number of university research labs are working on this. When so many people work on a problem, they generally crack it.” Battery life is getting better all the time and the new Tesla car batteries last for eight years. “There’s a bunch of new ways through which we’ll come up with new storage systems that are not based on heavy metals,” says Min. “That’s a given. So to discard the whole electricity system because the current storage [and recycling] system is polluting is not sensible.” On top of that, Auroville generates its own electricity, thanks to the Varuna wind farm. “We’re producing 1.6 times our own needs for electricity. So we’re not polluting,” Min argues. “In the balance of things, electric vehicles are the best option today.”