Why it is difficult to come up with a viable public transport

model for all cities

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viable-public-transport-model-for-all-cities/articleshow/66101927.cms
October 6,
2018

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Business News›News›Economy›Infrastructure›Why it is difficult to come up with a viable
public transport model for all cities

A strong public transportation system can decongest urban

roads. But a viable and sustainable model that will work in
all cities remains elusive.
By
G Seetharaman
, ET Bureau|
Oct 06, 2018, 11.00 PM IST

BCCL

Traffic comes to a halt on Anna Salai in

Chennai traffic-jam-bccl

Lingaraj Dinni’s office is only 16 km from his home but he spends an hour and a half on
the road every day to cover the distance one way. This is hardly surprising considering
that the 43-year-old is based in Bengaluru, a city infamous for its spirit-crushing traffic.

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To make the commute less stressful, Dinni uses a mobile app to carpool. He would have
gladly opted for a public transport, except that it would be arduous as he will have to
change buses twice.

“The city has developed on the circumference but commute remains a big problem,” he
says, referring to the growth of IT parks on the city’s periphery. He bemoans the lack of
metro connectivity in the stretch he travels, despite the large volume of commuters in
this area. Bengaluru — India’s fifth largest city with a population of 8.5 million — has a
metro system that covers only 42 km on two stretches now; phase two is due to be
completed by 2023. The city’s only public transport system, till recently, was its buses —
unlike Mumbai and Chennai, which have long had a suburban rail system, or Kolkata and
Delhi, which have a wide metro network. With the metro system yet to connect several
parts of Bengaluru, roads remain the major transportation lifeline of the country’s tech
capital.

Irrespective of the connectivity options, all these cities and their smaller counterparts are
struggling to answer two questions: how to beef up their public transportation systems
and how to deal with the growing number of cars and two-wheelers. They are linked.
“The moment you strengthen public transportation, you discourage private ownership
(of vehicles),” says Ajoy Mehta, Mumbai’s municipal commissioner. But augmenting bus,
rail and metro networks is easier said than done. Despite government efforts to improve
urban connectivity, there are several issues in the way of rolling out an effective
transportation network. Besides, India, the world’s third largest emitter of CO2 in
absolute terms, has committed to cutting its emissions by a third by 2030 from 2005
levels. This narrows the options to mass transport systems.

But limiting ownership of private vehicles — the other part of the question — is even
more challenging. Government intervention, which might even improve public
transportation systems, is unlikely to solve this problem. As incomes rise, more and
more people will want to own vehicles and many will have more than one. Digest this: It
took India around 60 years to have 100 million registered vehicles, but just seven years
to reach 200 million, according to a Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) analysis of
government data. Similarly, it took 55 years for India to have 10 million cars but the
number tripled in just a decade. We have added twice as many two-wheelers in the last
10 years as we did in the previous 54.

Private vehicles are already choking our cities’ roads, though only a third of India’s
population is living in urban areas, according to the 2011 Census. By 2050, 60% of the
population will be in cities, says the government. This will put more pressure on
transportation infrastructure To add to the problem, experience has shown that one
model of transportation system might not work in all urban agglomerations.

Given all these difficulties, India is staring at a serious commuting conundrum. Solutions
have to be developed fast if we do not want to be caught in a severe jam.

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“The biggest problem in mobility is that the government does too little, too itsybitsy,”
says Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director, CSE. “We are getting lost in the
hardware of transport — the number of buses and the length of the metro line.”

Going Public
Mumbai has the highest public transport use among most populous cities

Source: Centre for Science and Environment

Moving People
Bengaluru fares the worst in public transport among India’s five most populous cities. In
2017, public transport’s share of motorised trips in the city was just 41.5%, compared
with 78.2% in Mumbai, which was the highest, and 77.1% in Kolkata. Bengaluru ranked
below Mumbai and Chennai on a 2018 global urban mobility index by Arthur D Little, a
management consultancy. Singapore, Stockholm and Amsterdam ranked on top. The
index measures the maturity, innovativeness and performance of cities’ transport
systems Srinivas Alavilli, a civic activist in Bengaluru, says globally the philosophy of
urban transport is about moving people. “But in Bengaluru, it’s all about how to make it
easier for cars.”

A bus roughly carries as many people as 30 cars and its fuel consumption and air
pollution are one-sixth of 30 cars, according to the CSE. Cars’ share of total energy
consumed by different modes of road transportation is set to double to 27% by 2040,
from 13% in 2013, according to the International Energy Agency. Alavilli says the number
of buses in Bengaluru, 6,500, has not changed in six years. “The Bengaluru
administration says there is no space for more buses on the road, but somehow there is
space for 300 new cars every day.”

Citizen Mobility
No of per capita trips a day in 2017

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Metro & Mobility
Even the Bengaluru metro has not been able to beat buses in passenger volume. Buses
in the city carried 12 times as many people as its metro as of 2017. Alavilli says a
suburban rail system is the answer for commuter woes. The 2018-19 Union Budget
allocated Rs 6,030 crore for a suburban rail network in Bengaluru. A similar sum will be
contributed by the state government for the 142 km network. “It is the biggest low-
hanging fruit,” says Alavilli.

Several cities have seen a clamour for a metro system after Delhi metro began
operations in late 2002. Ten cities now have operational metro lines running along 425
km. But a metro system might not be the solution in all the cases. The networks in
Lucknow, Jaipur and Kochi, Chennai have been criticised for attracting much lower
riderships than originally estimated — less than a tenth of the projections. The Union
government has allocated Rs 14,300 crore for metro projects in 2018-19, more than a
third of the allocation for the urban affairs ministry.

Madhav Pai, India director at the World Resources Institute Ross Center for Sustainable
Cities, says the metro system does not solve mobility problems for the poor. A city
should opt for a metro network only if it can offset the capital cost by monetising land
around stations, as fares alone cannot defray costs, Pai says. “Otherwise public money is
used to subsidise the middle class. That money can be better spent on buses, education
and healthcare.” Roychowdhury says that since most of our trips are 3-5 km, a metro
system cannot be a solution to all our transportation woes.

Car Dependence
Average distance per car trip in 2017 (km)

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Urban transportation policies in India have been ad hoc at best, say experts, with little
regard for the needs of a city and its constraints. Luis Bettencourt, director of the
Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago, says, “Tokyo
invented transitoriented development. They were able to develop the land around stops.
The government didn’t pay for the infrastructure itself. That’s how cities develop.”

Mumbai, a linear city, is thinking beyond buses and the metro system to decongest
roads. A 29 km coastal road has been proposed between Marine Lines in the south and
Kandivali in the north. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has awarded contracts
for the Rs 12,700 cr, 10 km stretch on the southern end. “The Western Express Highway
is running at full capacity,” says Mehta, Mumbai’s municipal commissioner. “The coastal
road will be an alternative to that.”

Mumbai’s suburban trains, often called the lifeline of the city, are notoriously
overcrowded. Pressure on the system is showing in its infrastructure. In September 2017,
23 people died in a stampede on a footbridge at one of the stations.

Emissions
Per trip CO2 emissions (kg/day) *

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As the city expands, Mumbai’s new transport systems will have to connect localities on
the fringes of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region to its business hubs.

One of the primary reasons for poor urban planning in India is the presence of multiple
agencies and often-disjointed state and central government schemes. For instance,
besides the municipal corporation, there may be an infrastructure development agency,
a transport corporation and even a separate entity for the metro system, while the
suburban rail network is operated by the railways.

The Smart Cities Mission attempts to bring in a certain amount of coordination between
the agencies. Unveiled in June 2015, the programme, one of the marquee initiatives of
the government, is aimed at upgrading infrastructure in 100 cities. The government
agreed to give each of the cities Rs 100 crore every year for five years, with an equal
contribution coming from the state government and the urban local body combined.

According to the CSE, a fifth of the allocation for the mission is for urban transport.
Pune’s bus transport corporation has plans to procure 500 air-conditioned electric
buses, including 150 in the first phase, for which Rs 75 crore will come from the mission.
The city is also looking at reassessing the designs of streets. “We are looking at facilities
for non-motorised transport, pedestrians and junctions are being redesigned, with an
adaptive traffic management system with cameras and radars at each junction,” says
Rajendra Jagtap, chief executive of Pune Smart City Development Corporation.

According to the CSE, a fifth of the allocation for the mission is for urban transport.
Pune’s bus transport corporation has plans to procure 500 air-conditioned electric
buses, including 150 in the first phase, for which Rs 75 crore will come from the mission.
The city is also looking at reassessing the designs of streets. “We are looking at facilities
for non-motorised transport, pedestrians and junctions are being redesigned, with an
adaptive traffic management system with cameras and radars at each junction,” says
Rajendra Jagtap, chief executive of Pune Smart City Development Corporation.

Urban Mobility Index

Average distance per car trip in 2017 (km) 2018 rank

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Sharing Mobility
Besides the Smart Cities Mission, schemes such as the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban
Renewal Mission, which has played a key role in upgrading buses in cities, and the Atal
Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT), which aims at improving
basic services in cities. But urban transport projects under AMRUT account for just 1.75%
of the total cost of projects under the scheme.

Among the most significant developments in urban mobility in recent years has been the
rise of ride-hailing services like Uber and Ola, which also let users share rides. These
apps have upset the apple cart and forced cabbies and autorickshaw drivers to go on
strike repeatedly. State governments have threatened these companies with regulation .
The Economic Times recently reported that Gujarat was planning to cap the statewide
fleet of aggregators at 20,000 cabs each. In a separate report, ET said growth in the
volume of Uber and Ola rides, including in autorickshaws and on bikes, has dwindled to
20% this year, compared with 57% last year.

While a lot of attention is given to metropolitan cities like Mumbai and Delhi, we might
miss the bus on implementing sustainable changes in tier-II cities like Vijayawada and
Nashik. Such places rely mostly on private vehicles and buses. People buy vehicles when
public transport cannot absorb the transition from non-motorised to motorised
transport, says Roychowdhury. She adds that there is an opportunity to fix the urban
transportation problem in these cities before they become bigger.

It is clear that the future of urban transport is not in roads packed with cars and bikes.
While the auto industry will lobby the government against higher taxes on vehicles, one
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of the alternatives is to disincentivise car purchases by making public parking expensive.
But such measures, including Delhi’s abortive experiment to allow odd and even-
numbered vehicles to ply on alternate days, will work only if the load carried by private
vehicles can be absorbed by affordable and comfortable public transportation modes.
Moreover, cities known for their efficient mobility options, like Copenhagen and Zurich,
make sure urban transport is integral to the way the city develops, rather than playing
catch-up, which is what Indian cities do and often fail at. As of today, no big Indian city
can claim to have a particularly good transportation network. It is going to take more
than an expanding metro network and a few hundred buses to fix that.

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