TransportGooru

(Source: Times, UK)

As a sales pitch for a holiday paradise, you would think it left much to be desired. “We have hoardings obscuring heritage sites, we have terrible roads, we have sewage and solid waste problems. And we have some of the lousiest airports in the world.”

But Amitabh Kant’s blunt critique of his homeland’s shortcomings is part of an approach that has earned glowing reviews from some of the tourism industry’s fussiest arbiters – picky Western travel writers.

When he is not deploring the state of Indian public toilets, the dapper civil servant, who in 2001 was handed the job of rescuing India’s sinking tourism industry, likes to measure his success by counting the billions of dollars that he has helped to add to the country’s foreign currency reserves by luring upmarket travellers to the lush backwaters of Kerala and the grand palaces of Rajasthan.

In industry circles, he is treated as something of a guru. The day before talking to The Times, Mr Kant had been the guest of honour at a lavish Mumbai reception hosted by Ratan Tata, India’s most-fêted businessman.

Mr Kant’s journey in the tourism industry began at a similarly inauspicious time for the tourist trade. In 2001, when he became joint secretary of the Ministry of Tourism in Delhi, India’s tourism-related revenues were languishing at $2 billion a year, less than 0.5 per cent of the industry’s global turnover.

Across the country, hotel room occupancy rates had fallen to 25 per cent and tour operators were refusing to offer trips to India in their brochures. Faced with a crisis, he says, his objective was clear: to redefine India as a luxury destination, and to discourage those looking for an ultra-cheap getaway.

In an effort to dissuade the gap-year students, Goa-bound ravers and ageing hippies that have travelled India for decades, Mr Kant tried to stop cheap charter flights flying to popular seaside locations such as Kerala. To replace them, he promoted new, sometimes controversial, “high-value” forms of tourism.

Among the most radical moves was the decision to promote India as a destination where foreigners can access cheap medical care. The resulting steady stream of middle-class Western patients has proven lucrative, but some feel that Indian doctors would be better employed treating Indian patients.

Across the country’s seldom-travelled agricultural hinterlands, “rural tourism” was championed, with villagers being trained in how to host Westerners and sell them handicrafts. Entrepreneurs have been encouraged to set up homestays, houseboats and treehouse hotels.

But the main tool he used to attract these well-heeled travellers was the “Incredible India” campaign. A series of adverts displayed internationally but co-ordinated by Mr Kant from Delhi, it represented India’s first attempt to sell itself under a single banner.

Visible today in London and New York, it was launched in 2002, just as the post-9/11 malaise in the global tourism industry was approaching its nadir. As rival destinations slashed their promotional budgets, India, under Mr Kant’s direction, ramped up its spending, splashing out to create a marketing strategy far slicker than anything it had used before.

The gamble worked. Last year, when Mr Kant’s tenure at the ministry ended (and he was rotated to a posting in his home state of Kerala), India’s annual earnings from tourism had risen more than fivefold, to $11.6 billion, and the readers of Conde NasteTraveller had ranked India as the world’s “No1 preferred travel destination”.

The most commonly cited example of India’s lax attitude towards its cultural assets is that of the Taj Mahal, a building often referred to as the world’s most magnificent monument to love but which is near a heavily polluted river and is serviced by a dank, smelly, intimidating train station.

Mr Kant blames “a failure of municipal governance” for the Taj’s inglorious surroundings. India’s state chief ministers, arguably the country’s most powerful politicians, need to realise that tourists can be more lucrative even than that totem of India’s economic renaissance: software.

“The size of the tourism industry is $4.6 trillion [£2,800 billion], whereas the software industry globally is a mere $500 billion,” he said. “The tourism industry globally generates over 250 million jobs, whereas the software industry generates only 20 million.

“But you can’t cultivate tourism by having the Taj Mahal, a great heritage site, and having garbage and filth outside. The entire experience has to be spiritually and mentally rejuvenating.”

Click here to read the entire article.

Note: A couple of comments under this article were too compelling to not publish.  So, I copied and pasted them here:

Just returned from 6 weeks back-packing in South India and have to say that it was undoubtedly ‘incredible’ – that’s incredible noise, incredible pollution, incredible poverty but then again incredible sights, incredible food and most of all incredible people. Amitabh Kant’s campaign is spot -on!

Jim Blair, UK

Just returned from business to Mumbai, Agra, Delhi and Chennai. Could not agree more with Mr Kants assessment of the airports – shockingly bad and very indifferent to business and first class passengers. However, every Indian I met was extremely helpful. Customer service everywhere puts UK to shame!

Andy Dean, UK

(Source: Guardian, Nigeria, John MAcilree’s weblog & Mysinchew.com)

Some 50 million jobs and US$3.6 trillion of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) will depend on aviation by 2026, according to a report from Oxford Economics.  The Oxford Economics report provides an in-depth look at the aviation industry’s contribution to global economic development and social prosperity, while considering what that really means for individual countries, regions, towns, families and species.

Image Courtesy: Michael Davis @ Flickr via Apture

The forecast was contained in the report on “Aviation: The Real World Wide Web” by Oxford Economics, a world leader in quantitative analysis and economic forecasting.  The 120 page report is offered along with four page summaries available in English, French, German and Spanish.

In a statement Monday, Oxford Economics highlighted that limiting aviation’s growth to one percent below the current trend would cost six million aviation related jobs and the industry’s GDP contribution by US$600 billion.

Among other things, the report finds that air transport directly employs over 5.5 million people and contributes $425 billion to global GDP, which is more than several members of the G20.”Close to 20 million jobs could be supported by the Asia Pacific region’s air transport sector in 20 years,” it said.

According to the report, aviation’s GDP contribution is around one and a half times the size of the pharmaceutical industry ($270 billion GDP) or the textile industry ($286 billion GDP) and a third bigger than the motor production industry ($322 billion GDP).  When combined with its supply chain and dependent industries, including its contribution to tourism, aviation supports over 33 million jobs and $1.5 trillion GDP. As a country this would rank aviation in eighth position, between Italy and Spain.  An estimated 35 per cent of all trade in manufactured goods travel by air. This is worth some $3.5 trillion.

Oxford Economics said while reduced growth in aviation would have considerably impact on global employment, economic output and social development but it would not necessarily imply lower emissions when the impact of replacement activities and alternative transport are taken into account.

“Aviation currently contributes two percent of worldwide man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and will be no more than three percent by 2050,” it said.

The full report includes a number of case studies, as well as regional summarie,  from around the world about the impact of aviation.

The report acknowledges that aviation has an impact on the environment, but seeks to balance the debate about its future by highlighting the benefits it brings to so many people worldwide. The solution, says Oxford Economics, is policy that supports a sustainable balance between the positive contribution of aviation and the impact of future growth.

The report was commissioned by Airbus, with support from British Airways and EasyJet, but the results are independent and unbiased, says Adrian Cooper, managing director of Oxford Economics.”The conclusions and data in the report are a result of widely accepted economic modelling and Oxford Economics’ extensive knowledge of the aviation industry.

(Source: Eventbrite via Bernie Wagenblast)

Newcastle University and Imperial College would like to invite you to participate in a different sort of Workshop to help shape future research into sustainable intelligent transport.

It will be sparky; it will be challenging; it will think the unthinkable – and it will be FREE with refreshments provided.

You’ll not want to miss it, will you?

• Will the Internet and technology influence how we travel? Whether we travel at all?
• Can technology help mobility?
• How useful is “user-generated content”?
• How far can mobile Internet and Web2.0 get you? – literally
• Where is transport research going?
• Did Beethoven have a food processor?

Come and listen to new thoughts on old problems; share with us what you think matters; show us what you’re up to; join in when people ask the questions they’ve always wanted to pose on transport and the Internet; suggest the areas you think need investigation.

Proceedings will be live blogged and tweeted from the event; together with remote contributions. These will be forwarded to EPSRC as the outcome of the workshop and the SIMM final report.

If you’d like details about attending, exhibiting, making a short presentation or demonstrating a product or technology, or following the workshop online please contact Hannah Bryan:hannah.bryan@newcastle.ac.uk at Newcastle University (0191 222 6420).

This is the outline programme. It is still a work in progress, and is likely to change before the actual event, especially as we’d like your comments on it .

So, your thoughts and comments are welcome, particularly for the interactive panel sessions in the afternoon…

(Source: ABC News, FastLane Blog & YouTube)

The U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood made a post this morning on his FastLane blog that had a time stamp of 5:53AM.  Feels good to know that someone at the Secretary’s-level cares to let the citizens know about what he is doing through such blog posts, even if can squeeze a minute or two to press a blog at that ungodly hour of the day.   Thank you, Hon. Secretary LaHood for keeping us informed. 

 In his post he noted that later in the day, he will convene a summit with representatives from the major air carriers, their regional partners, aviation industry groups and labor on the topic: improving airline safety. “Every one of us who gathers here today has a responsibility to take the necessary steps to make flying safer. And, we will make sure that carriers and their regional partners are working together on all aspects of safety. Our goal is simple: We must inspire confidence in every traveler, every time he or she steps onto a commercial aircraft of any size, at any airport in the country. It’s an enormous responsibility; it’s our highest duty” ,observed the Secretary.

Along with the FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt, he pulled together the FAA and industry leaders to produce an immediate “to do” list to assure the flying public that all our country’s carriers–including our regional carriers–are operating as safely as possible.  He stated the highest priority is protecting lives and to that end, the USDOT will act quickly to set effective industry standards on crew education, training and performance, professionalism, and flight discipline.

ABC News report from the Summit had the following: FAA administrator Randy Babbitt told airline companies today he expects them to do complete background checks on pilots before hiring them to fly passengers — including getting permission from pilots to access all of their training records. Airlines are allowed to do that today but it became clear in wake of the February plane crash in Buffalo, N.Y., that not all of them do.

“There’s a public perception out there, unfortunately, right now that pilots can repeatedly fail check rides and still keep their jobs,” Babbitt said. “We want the passengers in this country to have absolutely no doubt about the qualifications of the person or crew flying their airplane.”

“I want a recommendation today about asking Congress to expand the scope of the Pilot Records Improvement Act to give employers access to all of the records available in a pilot’s file,” Babbitt also said.

Though current law dictates that pilots must sign a release allowing potential employers access to their training records, the Federal Aviation Administration on Monday set new expectations and strongly recommended the airlines ask for access. Finding ways for airlines to voluntarily make flying safer was the focus of conversation as representatives from all corners of the airline business gathered at the FAA in Washington, D.C., with Babbitt and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

“We want to be innovative,” Dan Morgan, vice president of Colgan Air’s safety and regulatory compliance, said last week. “We’re part of an industry that’s highly regulated, but there’s nothing that says that we can’t try to do a few things that haven’t been done before.”

High on the agenda was crafting a manifesto by day’s end to reassure travelers that airlines are doing all they can to ensure pilots are beyond prepared to fly passengers to their destinations, and to help more senior pilots mentor those with less experience.

Click  here to read the entire summit report.

(Source: Autoblog & Motor Age via Search Auo Parts)

According to a recent Kelley Blue Book study, 87-percent of new-car shoppers said they thought gas prices would go much higher. Seems like the obvious choice to us, too.

Curious what those expectations for rising fuel costs are having on new-car purchasing decisions? KBB’s got a statistic on that, too. More than 60 percent of in-market new-car shoppers said that rising gas prices have either caused them to change their minds completely or at least made them think about vehicles they normally wouldn’t have considered. For instance, consumers may opt for a four-cylinder or V6 engine instead of a more powerful and furl-thirsty V8.

When asked in May 2009 what they think will happen with gas prices in the next 30 days, 87 percent of new-car shoppers said they thought gas prices would go much higher, a significant jump from the 66 percent who thought gas prices would increase just a month earlier.

In both April and May, more than 60 percent of in-market new-car shoppers said that rising gas prices have either caused them to change their minds or made them think about vehicles they normally wouldn’t have considered. When asked what they would be most likely to compromise in their next new-vehicle purchase in order to save money they might need to spend on fuel, shoppers cited engine size (for example, a four-cylinder versus a V6 or V8) as the top item likely to be sacrificed, followed closely by vehicle size (for example, a mid-size sedan versus a large sedan).

In addition, Kelley Blue Book reports that 73 percent of those who saw gas prices increasing in May said they plan to change their spending habits if gas prices were to go much higher.

KBB’s data further indicates that $3 gallons of gas may be the new tipping point that will get consumers to alter their spending habits. See more in the official press release after the break.

Click here to read the press realse from KBB.

(Source: Urban Omnibus, Wired)

Urban Omnibus and The Infrastructurist talk to the founder of Zipcar and GoLoco about everything from mesh networks to taxi stands to why “infrastructure is destiny.”  In this exhaustive interview published on the Urban Omnibus, you can get to read about Robin’s new social networking project that aims to turn your social network into a travel network. The last couple years she’s been working on GoLoco, which aims to do for ride sharing what Zipcar did for car sharing: to make it easy, efficient and commonplace to share car travel, split costs, and reduce emissions. GoLoco members receive alerts when one of their friends or interest groups is going whether they want to.  Here is an interesting excerpt from the interview, that offers a better understanding of how GoLoco works.

So, as you have moved from Zipcar to GoLoco, from car sharing to ride sharing, do you see ride sharing as more of a national set of strategies?
Yes, car sharing only works in dense metropolitan areas or in cases where people don’t need a car to get to work. If you need a car to get to work, you’re going to have to own your own car. The cost of car sharing is too high for a daily commute. But, then again, according to the National Households Consumer Survey, across the nation it costs $24 per day on average that people are spending in America on their car, day in and day out. If I were to tell you that it was going to cost $125 a week to go to work, you would say, no way, I’m not going to do it. But we are doing it – we just don’t realize we’re doing it.

That’s why I did GoLoco – I said, what about all those other people who are feeling similar transportation and mobility pains but they need a car to get to work? Ride sharing is for those people.

Screenshot of GoLoCo portal (Courtesy: Urban Omnibus)

Can you give us ride sharing 101? How can GoLoco change how we get around?

The big idea for ride sharing and for GoLoco is to think of your car, your expenses, your friends, and your trips as part of your own personal public transportation system. Your friends and their cars and their trips are ways that you can get around. It builds on the idea of long tail media and long tail economics. Ride sharing is the long tail of public transportation. There are rides that serve little niches of demand way out there, in places where you’ll never see a bus service, or a public transportation service of any kind, but you would see ride sharing, because of the individuals who do go way out there. Basically, if you look at the long tail, ride sharing can meet the needs of small groups of individuals who need to get from a specific origin to a specific destination at a particular time.

I think when we look back at ourselves sitting alone in our 120 square feet of car, driving down these highways with incredible storage costs and incredible operating costs, I think we will look back at how we travel today and be just astounded: astounded at the cost, astounded at the waste. It’s such a wacky idea that we’d want to be alone in our cars spending huge sums of money and all that parking space, when it was less fun and more expensive and kind of crazy.

This is why I did GoLoco. We know that we can’t build our way out of congestion, so if things are increasingly, year after year, getting more congested, there’s only one solution for that: addressing the cost of driving over peak periods.

At $2 per gallon, people spend 18% of their income on their car, and that’s without paying for congestion pricing or tax increases or any other changes to transportation financing coming down the road. But it’s not in the control of any government to effect what the ultimate price of gas is going to be when we have increasing demand from India and China, and arguably peak oil. We have an increasing world population that will continue to drive cars with gasoline on our roads. Ride sharing is going to be significant while we transform our infrastructure to be less car-dependent. While we have such a high cost of car travel in such a car-dependent country, I don’t see another solution. 86% of trips made are alone in a car. Think about standing in a mall, looking at a parking lot. You know that a large number of people there are going exactly where you’re going in the next five minutes.

Image Courtesy: Wired - iPhone Zipcar App

Click here to read the entire interview.

In other related ZipCar news,  there is a new iPhone App from Zipcar which makes car sharing a breeze.  The pioneering car-share company has developed an iPhone app you can use to choose, reserve and locate a car on the go – a brilliant move, considering one-quarter of the company’s subscribers have an iPhone in their pocket.

The app tells you what cars are available and uses GPS and Google Maps to direct you to it once you’ve made a reservation. Should the car you’re looking for be lost in a sea of cars in a parking lot, the app will help you find it by sounding the car’s horn. That’s also handy for finding your ride if you’ve forgotten where you’ve parked it.  Zipcar is the largest car-sharing service in the world, with locations in 49 U.S. cities in addition to Vancouver, Toronto and London. The company believes the app, which will be available later this summer, will allow it to expand its service and make car-sharing a breeze.

“There are currently 15 million people within a block of a Zipcar service station and about 47 million iPhone customers,” says Luke Schneider, Zipcar’s chief technology officer. “We therefore estimate that our car sharing network could potentially increase to 32 million customers in years to come as a result of our new partnership and expansion into new markets.”

(Source: Infrastructurist)

NY Times Magazine Cover

In this week’s edition of New York Times’ Times Magazine there is a lot of stuff related to the theme of infrastructure. To save you the energy of skimming the table of contents and then feeling guilty for not reading anything, the Infrastructurist has summarized it the relevant article.  I further skimmmed it to foocus on articles that are relevant to transportation infrastructure, keeping with the focus of this website.

• Ray LaHood thinks of America as “one big pothole.” He thinks families will still have cars in the future, but one or two instead of two or three. And he’s not coordinated enough to skateboard.
• An excellent and rather comprehensive article about the California High Speed Railproject looks at the miserable condition of the Golden State’s passenger rail system today, the immense logistical challenges in a building a dedicated rail link (it makes fighting a war seem easy) and compares California’s efforts to the famous TGV in France, which got its start in 1971 and these days always runs on time.
• The way we build bridges in this country often yields unattractive structures that aren’t all that durable. An example of a project done right though is the rebuilt I-35W bridge in Minneapolis. It’s fetching to look at and smartly integrates a new generation of electronic monitoring technology.
• Lovely pics by Jamey Stillings of a $190 million bridge being built over the Colorado River to connect Las Vegas and Phoenix without having to drive over the Hoover Dam. (Sample above)
• A video presentation of some radical proposals to remake Paris for the 3rd millennium. One scheme would create a Parisian knockoff of Central Park. Another has “a 1000 kilometer-long farmer’s market and garden.”
• Futuristic design ideas: an airport off on its own island like Lost, a second deck on NYC roadways for eco-style golf carts, and clean green waterwheel generators installed along the city’s waterfront so you always feel like you’re on a riverboat.

Those interested in reading the entire list, please stop by The Infrastructurist.

(Source: LA Times & Newsroom Finland)

Finnish railway workers say they will halt all passenger and cargo traffic on Monday to protest the state-owned railway company’s personnel policies and layoffs.

Vesa Mauriala, chairman of the union, said he hoped the 24-hour walkout would lead to a debate on the hardening of values in society in general.  According to Mr Mauriala, the two main railway unions have been angered by the state’s ownership policy in the wholly government-owned Finnish Railways (VR).

“The state is simply demanding too much from VR,” Mr Mauriala said.

According to the union VR has previously been an example of good personnel policy and there have been very few layoffs and strikes. However, recently Finnish Railways announced it would make 1,500 employees at VR Cargo temporarily redundant.

VR assured customers on Friday that it would refund all tickets purchased for Monday. The strike is estimated to result in millions of euros in losses.

VR employs about 12,600 workers. Recently, it announced 1,500 job cuts to save costs.

(Source: Bureau of Transportation Statistics, USDOT)

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics of the Research and Innovative Technology Administration has released “A Time Series Analysis of Transportation Energy Use Per Dollar of Gross Domestic Product” (GDP), a report about the decline in transportation energy use relative to GDP.  The statistical analysis shows that transportation energy consumption has been declining relative to GDP since 2000 with a steeper decline beginning in the third quarter of 2007, when the cost of fuel rose dramatically.

Transportation energy use relative to gross domestic product (GDP) has been declining within the past decade. However, the total transportation energy consumed (see figure 1) shows only a more recent decline. To see clearly the long-term decline, the seasonal component first must be separated from the underlying trendline to observe the long-term trend of that energy consumption. Then the ratio of the deseaonalized data and GDP can be taken.

The report is the first in the BTS series titled Transportation Trends in Focus.  The report can be found at http://www.bts.gov/publications/bts_transportation_trends_in_focus/2009_06_01/.