You can keep adding buses to the roads, even make them sleeker and smarter, but how do you expand the roads?
When India’s first metro in Kolkata became fully functional in 1995, after nearly a quarter century of painful labour, Shanghai had just emerged on the world subway map with a 16.1 km north-south line, about the same length as Kolkata’s. Today, while Kolkata is stuck with its 16.45 km, Shanghai has blossomed into a network of eight lines, with a total length of 227 km and 161 stations, and is still growing.
Since then, India has had a second metro, in Delhi, with a three-line network totalling 68 km, Kolkata has been trying for the last ten years to add an 8.7 km extension to its existing line (while a new 13.77 km east-west segment is slated), Chennai and Hyderabad have advanced their metro plans, and Bangalore has been at work to fulfil its own metro dream. But all this put together is not even an inch closer to what China alone has been able to achieve, because we’ve never seriously looked at urban railway as a credible public transport alternative.
China already has over 500 km of tracks laid out. Forty Chinese cities are developing urban railway networks that could surpass 3,000 km over the next decade. Fifteen of them will have 1,700 km of metro lines in place by 2015; and Beijing, with an eight-line network totalling 193 km, to expand to 19 lines and 560 km in the next seven years, stands as a good example of how a wide spread of urban railways can make even a badly-congested city immensely more liveable.
Urban underground railway first came to Asia in 1927, when a line was opened in Tokyo, 64 years after the world’s first subway went into operation in London. But Asia really discovered the metro only in the mid-1960s, when Beijing began to build its metro. In 1971, Seoul built the first line of a network that now spans nine lines and about 287 km of tracks.
Then, in 1975, came Hong Kong with its Mass Transit Railway, which established the metro as the ultimate urban-transit solution. It became abundantly clear that, for a densely-built city like Hong Kong, with its narrow roads and heavy traffic volumes, underground was the only way to go for rapid, uncluttered, efficient, and accessible public commuting. When Singapore joined the club in 1987, a higher level of public transport efficiency was reached, establishing a benchmark for what might be described as pre-emptive traffic planning.
Today, Hong Kong’s 211.6 km network carries over 4 million commuters on an average weekday, and the ease of use that the Octopus Smart Card fare-paying technology provides has made the city’s metro like second nature for its 7 million people. Singapore’s 109.4 km Mass Rapid Transit (MRT), carrying 1.6 million people daily, is firmly established as the main backbone of its public transport system, and E-Z Link, the Singapore version of Hong Kong’s Octopus, makes all public commuting, surface or underground, as simple as taking a walk in the neighbourhood.
To make journeys even easier, Singapore is adding a circular line to its MRT that will connect all the radial lines leading into and out of the city. Due to open next year, the 33 km, all-tunnel line, with 29 stations, is billed as the longest fully-automated metro track in the world.
Hong Kong and Singapore prove beyond a shadow of doubt that buses alone can’t solve all the problems of urban public transport. It’s possible to go on putting more and more buses on the road, but it’s not always possible to expand road space at will. In a city like Kolkata, even a Bus Rapid Transit corridor is unthinkable. The result is more clutter on the surface, which slows traffic, which in turn makes people want to own their own cars, which worsens the situation even more. It’s a vicious circle that squeezes India’s cities like a noose and from which there’s no escape unless we can build parallel traffic corridors underground. People simply won’t leave their cars behind and use public transport unless they find it’s convenient, easy to ride, and rapid.
One country that refuses to understand this is India. What we have in Delhi and Kolkata are apologies of metros, and we may see more of them in near future. But we don’t have what can be called a metro mindset, of the kind we see elsewhere. We still believe buses are the only answer, but where’s the space to run them? We may bring in buses sleeker and smarter, but imagine what these would do to a city like Kolkata. We don’t realise that our cities are simply too ill-planned to have a surface-only traffic solution. We think metros are too costly. What about the huge and continuing economic cost of commuter time wasted daily on the road?
