BMW proves once again that they are concerned more about their customers' well being than just selling cars. This is a global project which aims at raising awareness of important urban challenges and inspiring an ongoing conversation in crowded cities around the world.
The focus of this program is to find the best solutions for the problem which every big city in the world faces: traffic congestion. We experience the frustration of driving inside a big city and the waste of time that comes with it.
Especially in India, this is a paramount problem. The Asian country is the second most populous country in the world, adding up to 1.2 billion souls. Mumbai is the most populous city in India and the fourth most populous one in the world, having 12 million inhabitants.
Therefore, the traffic problem is of grave importance. Every day up to 4.5 million people use the buses as a primary transportation method, whilst another 6.3 million use the railway systems.
BMW created the Guggenheim project in order to find solutions for the congestion that large cities around the world experience. Other important cities where this experiment took place are New York and Berlin.
For Mumbai, the researchers and architects, along with locals, tried to create a solution to the large number of cars that cross the city from one side to the other everyday. The main solution was the construction of skywalks that the pedestrians could use on a regular basis.
These skywalks would allow them to travel on small distances, between different points of interest. Also, as Neville Mars - architect and team member of the BMW Guggenheim Lab in Mumbai said, these skywalks could be build in such a way that they would allow small traffic made of rickshas, small tricycles and tutus to go around the city. Also, these skywalks would make the connections between central points of interests like train stations, airports and people's homes.
The future will be even more crowded so the solutions to this kind of problems will have to be even more creative than at this point. It's good that BMW stays on top of these problems and tries to help the communities as much as possible and it would be even better if other car manufacturers decided to chip in to help.
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