[blackwasp]

According to a study by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), an Indian car is parked for over 95% of the time and is driven for less than 5%. The survey was done over a year-long period. On average, a car spends 8,360 hours standing and is only driven for 400 hours in a year.



The study also highlighted a high waste of land usage due to extremely high demand for parking in urban areas. It has been estimated that the annual demand for additional parking spaces can be equivalent to as much as 471 football fields in Delhi, 100 in Chennai, 58 in Chandigarh, and 179 in Gurgaon. Further, cars or 2-wheelers amount to 85% of parking space usage but provide for only 4-15% of travel demand. In contrast, buses account for 4-5% of parking but carry 20 times more passengers than cars.

Parking charges are also one of the reasons why car ownership could get difficult. Across the world, India has one of the cheapest parking rates. Increasing parking rates could deter users from buying more cars, according the the CSE. A parking space utilises space equivalent to a low cost home for the economically weak. This results in lower taxes as well as takes away land for community infrastructure such as schools, healthcare centres, old age home, etc.



One of the solutions for parking is the parking area management plan (PAMP). Some of the ways PAMP can help is by careful planning, surveying of local needs, differential parking rates for prime and farther areas, high penalty for illegal parking, selling of parking spaces separately to make users aware of real cost of parking, promoting sharing of parking facilities, demarcation of emergency lanes in each direction on roads, promotion of public transport and more.

Link to the Team-BHP News

[Asish_VK]

Interesting study !

My car is only driven 30K km in 7 Years. Considering and average speed of 40 Kmph, it gives even lower % of utilization

750 Hours used and 60570 Hours parked
Usage of just 1.2%

[i74js]

CSE always comes out with such studies; for heavens sake, why can't they push better urban mobility and make government accountable for public transportation mess.

Look at Singapore, Washington DC, London on how public transportation is being managed and operated. There is always a room to play and sensationalize anything just by producing numbers.

The analytics should be used to talk about the present condition of public transport in Metros. Even Delhi metro was crippled when odd-even was executed first time.

[shankar.balan]

Interesting indeed. I can easily resonate with this. The Yeti in its 8 full years did 47735kms. Which comes to about 6000 kms per annum. 500kms a month.

The previous (recent) Gypsy which was with me 2 years, I was able to do about 3500-4000 kms in it overall in that 2 years - and that was pushing it for joyrides, for rides to and from the golf course and on those once in a while weekend jaunts in and around the city, just to help it stretch. This is at best another 200kms a month max.

This newer old Gypsy which I have had for 14 months, I have done about 3000kms in it. A large part of its life with me it has been under restoration and repair, but I am using it a little more than the other one.

The Cooper which I just got 3 weeks or so ago, well, I ve already clocked 1400kms in it. But it had done only 33732 in 7 years ownership, with the previous owner. That is approx 5000 kms per annum, no more.

So yes, this article is very thought provoking, especially as to why one is nuts enough to buy a car if one’s driving is so less. Basically the number and frequency of my road trips within India had come down severely between 2013 and 2019. Much more work. Much more travel. No longer able to spare/invest the time for such road trips.

Owning a car - I guess it is more about the convenience, to some extent “status” and of course the sheer necessity since the public transportation systems here are just so poor.

The pleasure, such as it is, of driving, does not exist any longer, given the road conditions, the crowds and the absolute chaos of traffic that we have to live with, whether in the City or on a Road trip.

[HYDRAVI]

So yes, this article is very thought provoking, especially as to why one is nuts enough to buy a car if one’s driving is so less.

Owning a car - I guess it is more about the convenience, to some extent “status” and of course the sheer necessity since the public transportation systems here are just so poor.

The pleasure, such as it is, of driving, does not exist any longer, given the road conditions, the crowds and the absolute chaos of traffic that we have to live with, whether in the City or on a Road trip.[/quote]

Thanks for this thread and shankar.balan is absolutely right. Thanks for team bhp to publish the bold reality. every bhpian should read this thread even if we
say live to drive. Once again humble thanks.

[irdevanand]

Can someone point me where in that article is that 95% mentioned? Couldn't find it. Btw my Honda City has done 38000 KMs in 45 months. At 50kmph average that comes to 760 hours of driving or 2.3%. Now i understand why i get this urge to buy a Hexa and drive into faraway places. My driving time has been one of my best thinking time and it has shrunk considerably. Good Article.

[2000rpm]

e risk with a mind less interpretation of data provided to officials. Am I an Uber driver to drive 40% of my time?

Is the government expecting everyone to drive more than 5% of our time? They are already ensuring this by increasing traffic on account of poor infrastructure.

Why is 5% a bad number?

By that logic, a Mumbaikar wears a sweater only about 5% of the time (2 months of winter / 12 months x 8 hrs per day / 24), however it occupies 15% of the storage space in cupboards.

Also, we use the Geyser only 1 hour a day for 4 months a year. Thats, 1.4% only. Hence should we not have a geyser at home.

Instead of suggesting us mechanisms to drive ownership down, why cant they publish a report on what percentage of roads are actually usable, analyze vehicle movement patterns and plan infra accordingly, mandate innovative parking ideas like towers etc?

[Gansan]

Except cabs, how will other cars run all the time? Assuming a typical person drives to work every single day, he may drive to the office for perhaps an hour, and then park there till the evening. At which point he will leave for home, drive for another hour or so and then park overnight at home. Which may be about 10 - 12 hours a week, maybe 15 hours if we count weekends. In a year it may drive for 800 - 900 hours only, which may roughly equal about 30 days. Rest of the time the car will just sit somewhere.

In what way is this different in other countries?

[shankar.balan]

Originally Posted by 2000rpm

e risk with a mind less interpretation

Is the government expecting everyone to drive more than 5% of our time? They are already ensuring this by increasing traffic on account of poor infrastructure.

why cant they publish a report on what percentage of roads are actually usable, analyze vehicle movement patterns and plan infra accordingly, mandate innovative parking ideas like towers etc?

I agree with the fact that they would be better occupied in analysing how many of our roads are actually useable. And how much energy in the form of fuel, we all waste, just sitting and idling in horrible traffic which is the result of poor, unplanned and woefully inadequate / non existent infrastructure.

But then, this is India. And this is the Indian government.
Forget it!

[Vysakh]

5% translates to a 72 minutes a day, which, sounds like a decent number to me, unless it's a taxi.

[vigsom]

The "on-the-move" indicator is good to use for commercial vehicles, not personal ones.

In my view, one car per family of 4 should suffice given today's parking woes and maintenance.

I know a family here that has a WagonR, an Innova, a Fortuner, and a Honda City for a family of four; that is gross under-utilisation.

For stats, Potential = 365 days a year x 24 hours a day x 30 kmph = 2,62,800 kms a year at full utilisation

A good usage eg. 10k kms a year amounts to a mere 3.8% :-)

[saket77]

Very interesting. On that line, we should also avoid living in houses because most of the working couples reside only 12 hours out of the 24 in the house. So we are effectively using it only 50%?

Coming to cars, most would anyway be stationary at night. So, almost 10-12 hours could have excluded from the study so that skewing of data could have been avoided. That would straightaway account for 50% of distorted data.

And since most of us aren't professional drivers or using our cars for commercial purposes, we use them for getting 'things done' rather than doing 'it'. So, the utility is far more important for most of us rather than how much time we spend using it. I use my cars to drop my daughter school in the morning, which is max 15 kms of travel to & fro. This is very important for me since the bus comes pretty early in the morning and I prefer my young one to catch some more sleep. Also, I am a safety freak and prefer to drive her myself around belted properly in the rear seat. So, the utility & convenience my car provides rules over the 'time' I use it.

If you look at my bike riding, then I use it for only 8-9 kms a day which is even lesser than my car, but I use it to for my office commute which obviously helps me pay my bill. So, you get it, it's the utility, not absolute time that we spend using it.

Thanks.

[GrammarNazi]

Given houses/bathrooms are a basic human necessity, whether cars be compared to them is left to ones own judgement.

But IMO for 80% of the population, a car is the most under-utilised asset class and one of the most inefficient ways of resource allocation for any average household. This is one of the most important reasons people should re-imagine cars as tools.

Sadly, it happens so that Govts are too afraid to face the rise in unemployment and loss in revenue if car sales decline. Paradoxically, if transportation becomes efficient, it will only lead to unemployment and lower tax collection. Additionally, it becomes easier to manage citizens as they are divided into individuals, thus paving way for Govt to charge road tax, heavy tax on fuel, PUC Certification, Insurance, heavy traffic penalties, numerous tolls etc.

[SmartCat]

Hmm. There should be a study on how many hours a bathroom is used in a typical household. Both bathrooms and cars are not meant to be used something like 6 or 12 hours a day!

How many hours per day Indian cars are parked is not a useful statistic. What matters is how many hours per day Indian cars are parked in a public place.

[adi.mariner]

It's good that cars are used only 5% of the time and not more. I cannot imagine the chaos on the roads if the utilisation was 10% (double the cars on the road?). Also the pollution would increase consequently.
With the new projects having mandatory parking space, car ownership is already expensive if you add the cost of the parking space to the cost of the car.