India world’s number 1 in registered two-wheelers | India News

NEW DELHI: India, according to the latest Road Transport Year Book, has the maximum number of registered two-wheelers, followed by Indonesia. India ranks eighth in the world in number of passenger cars, while China, the United States and Japan are the top three.

The report has referred to the 2020 data of the International Road Federation, which is used as the reference across the countries.
As per the report, which has collated data from all states and UTs on registered vehicles, India had 32.63 crore vehicles in 2020 and nearly 75% of these were two-wheelers. Meanwhile, in the past three years, little more than two crore vehicles have been registered, taking the total number to around 34.8 crore till mid-July, data from the government’s Vahan portal show.

The government data show that among all states and UTs, Maharashtra had the maximum number of registered vehicles (3.78 crore), followed by Uttar Pradesh (3.49 crore) and Tamil Nadu (3.21 crore). Among the million-plus cities, Delhi topped the list with nearly 1.18 crore registered vehicles while Bengaluru had the second maximum number of vehicles at 96.4 lakh. Interestingly, while Delhi had the maximum number of registered private vehicles, its neighbouring city, Faridabad had the maximum number of 18.6 registered transport or commercial vehicles among such cities.
The data also show that the 55 million-plus cities had a 34% share of all the total registered private vehicles in the country, indicating how people have continued owning private vehicles due to lack of adequate public transport. “The trend has not changed and we are adding more two-wheelers across our cities and small towns. While their share has been increasing and high number of crashes involving them, we are yet to address the need of such large number of vehicles,” said road safety expert Rohit Baluja.
Some countries such as Malaysia, where 50% of the vehicles are two-wheelers, have gone for creating separate lanes for two-wheelers to prevent collisions.
Recently, at the ‘Vision Zero’ conference in Sweden where over 100 countries gathered to chalk out a plan to halve road fatalities by 2030 also agreed that motorcycles across the nations are emerging as the biggest challenge.
In India, the number of two-wheeler occupants killed has consistently increased to 69,385 in 2021 and it was 45% of all road fatalities.