Integrated transport system needed

Integrated transport system needed
Bangalore Metro to chug off in June
Business Standard

Metro rail, as a solution to Bangalore’s desperate traffic and commuting problems, seemed to be a fait accompli, if state government officials running the project were to be believed.

An interaction on the Metro here on Sunday, threw up one important idea: a unified authority was badly needed that took different transport and urban development agencies by the scruffs of their necks and implemented an “integrated transport system” for the city.

The interaction also became the first organised public debate on the Metro, though a tad late as the project now seems set to go ahead with the Centre's blessings.

A key state government official running the project said, “the prime minister himself is interested and therefore we have had no problems in getting Centre's clearances for the metro.” Work will start in June, they said.

Panelists at the interaction, organised by the Bangalore Chamber of Industry and Commerce, a trade body, had their doubts about the viability of the project. They included an architect and town planner and a representative of a civic organisation working for more inclusive politics in the state.

One reason was that it may not make enough money and may require state subsidy, they said. They also wanted to know if Bangalore Metro could serve as a backbone for a long term integrated approach to creating an affordable, reliable and clean public transport system in the fast growing city.

The Rs 6,200 crore first phase, some 36 km of "standard gauge" tracks dividing the city into roughly four segments, is to be completed by March 2010. The first train, however, will start plying from October 2008, along the Mysore Road — Byappanahalli arm of the project, said K N Srivastava, MD of Bangalore Mass Rapid Transit Limited, a state-centre JV entrusted with the project.

Key among the arguments were those of Abhijit Lokre, the architect from Enviromental Planning Collaborative, Ahmedabad and Swathi Ramanathan of Janaagraha, the civic organisation. Both pointed to the remarkable metamorphoses, in public transport using buses, in the South American cities of Bogota, Colombia and Curitiba, Brazil.

For instance, the Brazilian city has over a 1,000 buses making 12,500 trips a day serving 1.3 million people.

The privately-run buses help their users spend only a tenth of their annual incomes on transport, says dismantle.org, a website tracking effective solutions that "dismantle problems before they occur".

Curitiba's population today is less than a third of Bangalore's six million or so, but that city started planning three decades ago. The result was a master plan that "established the guiding principle that mobility and land use can't be dissociated" and that public transport will be given top priority, dismantle says.

Srivastava could not even say, at the interaction, how many trees would be cut in the "garden city" to make way for the project.

On the one hand, he said BMRTL hadn't gone to town about the Metro as the Centre’s go ahead hadn't come through. On the other, he said at the interaction, tenders had already been called for major works involved in building the project. That the Metro was one more project simply thrust on the people, without their voices being heard, was manifest at the interaction. One participant, an army colonel said people in his locality had not even heard of the project.

Lokre said, EPC was working on a project inspired by Bogota's success with its buses, to start something similar in Ahmedabad. The idea, he said, was to start with a solution that minimised disruption to people's lives and maximised the benefits of public transport.

Srivastava, on the other hand, thought it only natural to "pay the cost" of the Metro. The "cost" will involve gridlocks, closed roads, more dust, as work crew cut, blast and filled trenches needed for the tracks, businesses relocated and buildings demolished, said Zafar Saifullah, chairman of MetRail India, a firm promoting the mono-rail as an alternative to the Metro.

Saifullah claimed, with numbers, the monorail was a more economical and eco-friendly system and said his firm was prepared to "build own operate and transfer" some 55 km of it "at no cost to the state".

The monorail, he said will use a combination of solar power, onboard gas-fed generators and motorised gyroscopes producing electricity to power the coaches that were battery run, he said.

The Metro coaches, with 750V direct current traction, needed to tap the grid for power. BMRTL is asking the state to supply that power at Rs 2.5 a unit, while people in Bangalore paid over Rs 4 a unit, Saifullah pointed out.

With a tighter turning radius, 20m as against the Metro's 100m, the monorail did not need major acquisition of land or demolition of buildings either. To the Metro's Rs 250 crore a km, the monorail will cost Rs 45 crore a km and will be built "in half the time (18 months) with little inconvenience to the people of the city," he said.

On various agencies working together, the government was working on a single transport authority for Bangalore, said Srivastava and Upendra Tripathi, MD of the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation, which runs the city buses. Meanwhile, work on a second phase to the Metro had already started in the form of a survey.

"In two months, we will give the Bangalore Development Authority at least a skeletal map of future tracks, to be incorporated into its Comprehensive Development Plan," Srivastava said. The first phase had been so incorporated, he said. BDA is to release this plan in two weeks.

The panelists at the interaction have decided to meet again, soon, to generate further debate on the Metro. M F Saldanha, a retired judge said that at the next meet, the chief minister and the transport minister ought to be present.