New Delhi yesterday wrapped up a controversial trial of driving restrictions that took about a million cars off its roads, with arguments still raging about whether it is the right approach to cutting smog in the world’s most polluted capital.
The 15-day experiment, which started on Jan. 1, allowed private cars on the roads only on every alternate day and slapped violators with a fine of 2,000 rupees (US$30) in a bid to reduce air pollution.
It took more than a third of the city’s nearly 3 million private cars off the roads, visibly lessening the traffic on usually clogged routes.
Photo: AFP
In a city where road rules are routinely flouted, most drivers appeared to be obeying the restrictions and many said that they viewed the scheme positively.
“Commuting wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be,” said marketing executive Akshath Matharu, who has been taking the metro to work every other day. “Look at the roads, they’re so thinly populated. Who could have imagined free-flowing traffic in Delhi?”
A 2014 WHO survey of more than 1,600 cities ranked Delhi as the most polluted, partly because of the 8.5 million vehicles on its roads, with 1,400 more added every day.
The dramatic curbs were announced by Delhi’s Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in December as part of a wider anti-pollution drive that also includes shutting some coal-fired power plants and vacuuming roads to reduce dust.
The Delhi government said the trial resulted in a “more than 50 percent drop in air pollution primarily caused by vehicular traffic” and that the measures could be enforced again after a meeting on Monday.
However, India’s state-run System of Air Quality Weather Forecasting and Research showed levels of harmful PM 2.5 particles hovering between “very poor” and “severe” between Jan. 1 and yesterday — well above the WHO safe limit of 25.
Environmentalists attributed the persistent smog to low winds and a fall in daytime temperatures.
A number of challengers approached courts during the trial ban arguing it was inconveniencing residents and saying the city’s public transport system was not up to the task.
However, India’s Supreme Court, whose top judge backed the car-rationing plan at the outset, disagreed with petitioners.
“People are dying due to pollution and you are challenging it for publicity,” a bench of justices AK Sikri and R Banumathi said on Thursday.
The top court’s judges added that they had been car-pooling to improve the city’s filthy air, which claims up to 30,000 lives each year, according to the Delhi-based Center for Science and Environment.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.