How Poor Planning is Costing Delhites 21,600 liters of Fuel Each Day!

Many of us living in Delhi-NCR have cumulatively spent hours waiting at the NH-8 Delhi-Gurgaon Toll Plaza.

photo courtesy: tribuneindia.com

I ran a short calculation as I was waiting at the toll plaza this Saturday afternoon.

How much it costs you as a car owner:

·        Average waiting time for each car (to get from end of queue to toll point) = 10 minutes

·         Rule of thumb: For every 2 minutes spent idling, your car consumes the same amount of fuel it takes to go one km.

·         Average mileage of Car= 10 km/l or 0.1 l/km

·         Delhi Petrol price = Rs 70/ liter

·         So in 10 minutes of idling your car consumes = (10/2) x 0.1 liters = 0.5 liter of petrol = Rs 35!

·         Total cost of crossing toll plaza = Idling cost + Toll = 35 + 21 = Rs 56!

How much it costs us as a community:

·    Number of lanes = 18 each way

·         Total number of lanes = 18 X 2= 36

·         Average Number of cars waiting in each lane= 25

·         Total Number of cars idling at the Toll plaza at any given time = 25 x 36 = 900

·         From the previous calculation, each car is consuming 0.1 l every 2 minutes of idling = 0.05 l/min

·         Fuel being exhausted by all idling cars at toll plaza = 0.05 x 900 = 45 l/min!

45 liters of petrol are being poured down the drain EVERY minute at the Delhi-Gurgaon toll plaza!

The situation gets worse at night time when the idling vehicles are trucks which are even less efficient. If we consider 8 hours of such traffic each day, the toll-plaza consumes 21,600 liters of petrol a day.

Any technological recommendations to solve this problem? The tag lanes don’t seem to be working very well.

A Few Dirty Questions

I was driving on the outskirts of Delhi today. How much ever you try to avoid it, you cannot miss the omnipresent garbage, the dirt. On the side of the road, in the middle of the road, in empty plots. Garbage of every kind, plastic wrappers, chips packets, plastic bottles, organic waste and things that you cannot recognize.

Do we as Indians get used to living in the dirt, do we stop seeing it completely? Does it become invisible to us?

What are the reasons for this all-pervading garbage?

•          Do we as a society completely lack civic sense?
•           Do we not have the infrastructure for proper disposal and management of trash?
•           Do we not care how it affects our surroundings?
•           Do some people actually feel that it beautifies our surroundings?
•           Are we just generating too much waste per capita?
•           Is poverty an excuse? Maybe not, because even posh locales are in the same condition.

What can we as citizens, as individuals, as entrepreneurs do?

•          Participate in cleanliness drives? Is that sustainable?
•           Pick up the next wrapper that someone next to us throws on the road in the hope that we can set an example? Maybe too slow?
•           Curse the government and forget about it?
•           Just write about it?
•           It surely is an opportunity; can we make a business plan out of it?

It makes me immensely angry and agitated to see what we are doing to my country, to our country. And I am sure that many of us share the same sentiment.

The purpose of this post is not to rant. Neither is it to criticize. It is to share the extreme unrest that I am feeling. Maybe tomorrow when I am back to my regular routine, I may forget all about it. All the frustration that so many of us feel would be wasted if it results in no action. Hopefully there will be some discussion and some good suggestions coming out of this.

There is a fire in my belly, some fires are worth spreading.