The automobile is the greatest threat to civilized urbanity! It pollutes the air in rude black clouds of filth. It isolates passengers from their fellow citizens on the street. It kills as many people as any major disease. Its high cost creates a social divide. It leads to planning focused on machines, rather than on people. When planning responds to automobiles, cities become large parking lots and broad pavements. Rainfall, once absorbed into the natural soil, flows across roads and across parking lots, eroding more soil, and flooding the lower town.

The entire urban development effort can focus on flyovers, parking lots, service roads, repair areas and petrol pumps.

Advertising and entertainment media have wedded the image of the automobile into our minds. It has become a major component of the modern dream. Can there be a lifestyle without a ‘car’? The print images, and the fast cars in films, do not tell of the cancer victims from air pollution, or of the youths who die in car crashes yearly. Dealing with the automobile will be more difficult than dealing with the power bow. Even though less than one percent of Bhutanese subjects and less than fifteen percent of urban dwellers own these machines, automobiles dominate the minds of planners. Most troublesome, the automobile is determining the spread and pattern of our capital.

The alternative to the private automobile is clean, comfortable and reliable public transport! Public transport must be a key component of the plan. It provides the balance between the pedestrian and the machine. We must consider city buses, electric trams, and eventually a light rail system that runs up and down the city spine, along the river valley.