The Amazing Race 35, Episode 5

Jaipur (India)

This episode of The Amazing Race 35 reprised variations on tasks that have been assigned to contestants in previous seasons of the reality-TV travel show. Each pair of racers had to maneuver a motorized auto-rickshaw through heavy traffic, in a task similar to what the racers had to do in Season 24, Episode 6 in 2014 in Sri Lanka. Later in this leg of the race, they had to haul a load of heavy cargo through city traffic on a pedal-powered (or hand pushed) tricycle rickshaw, as the racers had to do in Season 27, Episode 10 in 2015 in Agra, India.

Some things haven’t changed in the years since those earlier seasons of The Amazing Race were filmed. Even Joel, whose main recreation at home in the USA is riding a road bicycle, found that pedaling a loaded cargo (or passenger) tricycle is far harder work. And the complexity of the urban Indian traffic mix, which includes everything from camel carts and stray cows to trucks and buses, with auto rickshaws swerving around them like bumper cars, hasn’t changed. Indian roads still require far more agility and driving or bike-handling skill than the irregular intersections and unpredictable drivers in downtown Boston, the worst-case scenario of traffic complexity in the US (as I know from working as a bicycle messenger in Boston many years ago).

What’s different now, as we saw in this episode of The Amazing Race 35, is that motorized Indian “auto-rickshaws” (often somewhat confusingly referred to in vernacular Indian usage simply as “autos”) are increasingly being powered by lead-acid batteries and electric motors rather than by compressed natural gas burned in internal-combustion engines.

While the ascendency of the e-rickshaw is an Indian success story, it’s also an object lesson that travellers to India and armchair travellers watching The Amazing Race 35 could apply to transport in the USA. One of the best outcomes of travel is when it makes us aware not just of different ways that people do things in the places we visit, but possibilities for different ways that we too could do things at home.

The names “rickshaw” and “tuk-tuk” make these vehicles sound like relics of the past, or like toys. Can you imagine trying to convince the average American to replace their family car or truck with an electric tricycle? But many transportation needs could be better met by something much smaller and that uses fewer resources to build and operate and takes up less space on the road or when parked than a car or truck, but that’s larger and more stable than a cargo e-bike and provides at least partial protection against rain and snow.

DHL, for example, already has more than ten thousand electric cargo tricycles in service delivering mail and parcels for the German post office. And having proven their cost-effectiveness elsewhere, DHL is beginning to deploy them in the USA as well.

During my childhood, my mother fantasized about the “pedicab” that she wanted to have to get around town without needing a car. One of her legs was shorter than the other, and she could never balance on a bicycle. So even before we went to India together in 1989 and saw what rickshaws (then mainly powered by noisy, smoky, two-stroke gasoline engines) could do, she imagined a three-wheeled adult tricycle with a cover to protect her from the rain and snow, and perhaps an electric motor to assist with carrying heavier loads such as children and groceries. Sadly, such a vehicle didn’t exist in the USA in those days. But now it does, or could if consumers demanded it — as perhaps they will after they’ve seen their own possible future in India or elsewhere around the world.

Seeing the range of niches being filled by electric rickshaws for passenger and cargo transportation in India and other countries can open our eyes to what we could be doing in the USA if vehicle and operator licensing allowed it.

Are there things you’ve seen in your travels that you didn’t know existed but that you’d like to see made available back home?