Auroville Appropriate Mobility (AAM)
Purpose
To promote an accident-free, pollution-free, gentle, peaceful, joyful, futuristic transportation in Auroville that reflects the third point of the Charter of Auroville stipulates – “Auroville wants to be a bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and within Auroville will take bold leap into the future.”
Explanation
On 7th September 1965, Roger Anger visited the Mother for the first time after being invited to serve as the chief architect of Auroville. In his meeting, Roger presented 5 guiding principles for the city. The fifth was mobility.
“The traffic principle needs to be defined right now. Should we allow the presence of cars: It is likely that in hardly a few years, India will witness, like Europe and the US, the major urban problem posed by the Automobile. The reign of car has conditioned the urbanism of the 20th century and continues to tyrannise it. Though it is outdated, and everyone knows it, the automobile does its best to create inferno within cities and to destroy the outside.
The choice to be made now is therefore to forbid the use of this means of transportation within the town and replace it by another one, more healthy, less clumsy and noisy and more aesthetical, maybe more recent, if possible.
Mother’s comments on a page of a small note pad:
English translation: Small size electrically powered vehicles, capable of transporting about 200 Kg at a speed of 15 km/h.
Three months later, in December 1965, a set of questions and their proposed answers were prepared by Gilbert Gauché was presented to the Mother. Question-answer 21 was as follow:
21: What will be the means of transport in Auroville?
Proposed answer: Inside the town, there will be no car traffic. Small vehicles, running at a speed of about 15 km/h will be at the disposal of the inhabitants for going around
English translation: electrically powered.
Nearly four years later, on 8.10.69, when above answer was shown to the Mother, she replaced it by
”We do not know”.
(Ref. MI, Feb 1970, pp. 10.11, SAS Info letter, 27, April 1970, Gaz. 3,1, p. 13, CWW, Vol. XIII, p. 196).
The above presentation brings out following points.
- Long before the electrical-powered vehicles became a vogue, The Mother foresaw their emergence in 1965!
- By saying that such vehicles will run at the speed of not more than 15 km per hour she was pointing to a serene, gentle, accident-free, pollution-free mobility in Auroville… a far cry from the present no speed-limit, often aggressive and agitated, accident-prone, combustion-powered conventional mobility in Auroville.
- Then, in 1969, by saying that “We don’t know” (what will be future modes of mobility in Auroville), she probably acknowledged that with the passage of time many new innovations, many new possibilities, many new technologies will emerge.
The aims of the Auroville Appropriate Mobility (AAM) would be
- To gather and make available to all interested individuals the study and research papers on Auroville mobility carried out so far by both residents and visiting scholars. These are quite extensive with very little or limited follow up & implementations.
- To collect and make available to the knowledge and information about the latest developments, latest experiments, latest ideas and visions about the better mobility. For example, a renowned Indian-American figure, Vinod Koshla has put forth the idea and vision of a self-driving public mobility system which is personal! This mobility system, according to Koshla, does away with traffic overflow and congestion, reduces the commute times, allows infrastructure, including housing, to develop better and, of course, it is free from accidents and pollutions.
- To promote the formation of Auroville Mobility Management Authority – a statutory body composed of qualified individuals with mandate and powers and resources to develop, manage, experiment and regulate the mobility in Auroville in consonance with the best practices in the world and a model of best mobility system that can be emulated elsewhere.
Further explanation
An extract from The Mother’s Agenda:
I find people are always in a hurry for nothing. They’re always rushing as if they had a train to catch! But why! … It’s one of the big, big mistakes. Why rush? It’s due to a sort of inner vibration, something that keeps vibrating on and on, spoiling everything.
Everything they do, they do fast, as if something were pushing them – they eat fast, move fast, sleep fast, they wash and dress fast, talk fast. But why? Why be in such a hurry?
I experience this over and over again! And I have to restrain myself from asking, “But what’s the hurry?”
As soon as you stop hurrying, you enter a truer vibration….”
(Ref. Mother’s Agenda – V. 3, dt. July 4, 1962)
Auroville is a place meant to manifest “a truer vibration”. Auroville mobility must be aligned with this ideal.
AAM will look into and explore all possibilities so that Auroville mobility becomes an inspiring benchmark for other places and cities in India and the world.
Present status
Aryadeep has many of the research papers on Auroville mobility. He has also written a few articles and put forth the ideas such as one day in a week when Auroville takes a collective resolution to go green – something which, if necessary, can be insisted as a rule. On the whole, the idea and vision presented here are only concepts on paper. Hopefully, topic of Auroville mobility will receive the attention it deserves because, from a particular point of view, it is also a question of Auroville’s identity.