Leave Alone Bullet Train, Set Urban Traffic Right First

By Mahesh Vijapurkar

It is a fact that we are going to have a bullet train – fast, expensive, and iconic for the transport sector – even as the safety issues in the railway system remains largely unaddressed. It is also a fact that the rising demand and inadequate arrangements in the sector is putting the citizens to avoidable hardship.

Had only supply stayed ahead of the demand. Long overdue Metros are coming up after the roads got crowded, and in the entire planning and execution, across India, pedestrian and cyclists are left to their fates – you cannot walk on sidewalks nor can you pedal on the roads because others have taken them over.

Thane (where I live), a compact city whose population has just crossed two million, is an example of how tardy planning and near-zero scale-up, can tie the city into knots. Ideas discussed in 1987 to provide high capacity mass rapid systems are not even on the drawing board today, and in the past decade, open roads are scenes of gridlocks built by private cars.

In Thane, buses were so badly managed that many literally rotted even before they were deployed, and spare parts were cannibalised, making it difficult to keep functioning at an acceptable level. Private operators, with political connivance, operate illegal buses on profitable. The core operator, the municipalised transport has promised to taken them on wet-lease.

The State as a facilitator ought to have arranged these in proper order but even intra-city routes are badly managed in most states. One may have to walk around with Diogenes to find anyreasonably comfortable, efficient, affordable, safe local transport in the country. If there are, I’d like to know about them.

Each city is experimenting with intra-city or even intra-urban agglomeration transport but the dependence continues to be on cars, scooters and autorickshaws and no place to park – at home or on roads. Pedestrian safety is ignored, speedbrakers disappear or not built, pedestrian crossings are not even thought of for private motorised transport has priority.

In Nagpur, private operators are to be ushered in, and given the reputations of civic bodies, the potential operators have asked for cash in escrow so payments are received on time from the civic body. Mumbai is seen as efficient because of the local trains, the municipalised transport, the black and yellow taxi cabs, now Uber and Ola etc, but it is not. All these slow down private and public vehicles, in some spots to 4 kmph.

The efforts to provide the long overdue Metros across some parts of the huge metropolitan region has begun, and the networking would take over another decade and a half to materialise. But that is not simply enough because the populations in the metropolitan region is growing without economic activity at new nodes to make short commute to work within each town possible.

It is only now that the Maharashtra has woken up to the reality that the civic bodies are unable to run them, are running in losses, and that Mumbai’s BEST is so close to bankruptcy that it cannot pay salaries on time to a staff running a depleting fleet to meet the diminished demand. It is considering extending financial help and set up a panel.

Even that would be a band-aid and nothing more unless each city – besides Mumbai, there are Thane, Navi Mumbai, Panvel, Kalyan-Dombivli, Ulhasnagar, Mira-Bhayandar, Bhiwandi-Nizampur, Vasai-Virar – have failed to serve their small geographies efficiently, the State has not even thought of amalgamating the infrastructure available and optimising it across the region.

A unified metropolitan road transport network would be a blessing. This would be something to think about because cities are growing into city regions and interconnectivity and within each node, intra-city movement is a critical requirement to keep the economy humming. Workers, like in Chandigarh, where the poorest stay, spend a lot of money and time to come to work in the planned city. At their cost.