Take the bus?

With the Delhi Metro running at around a fifth of capacity (the current ridership is 4.5 lakh passengers a day, against the original projection of 21.8 lakh at this stage of the project), it is time to take a hard look at the project. After all, the Metro's capacity utilisation is now in the same ballpark as that of its much-derided Kolkata predecessor. It has been argued (rightly) that passenger use will pick up once the Metro's network is complete, at around 200 km by 2020 (compared to barely 60 km today), but that should not preclude a vetting of the initial assumptions. For one, the projection of 21.8 lakh passengers was made by the Delhi Metro itself for the end of Phase I. How ambitious this was can be seen from the fact that, were this to be the case, nearly no one would be travelling by bus any more since the Delhi Transport Corporation's daily carriage by bus is 25 lakh. Second, as Professor Dinesh Mohan of the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi argues, while a metro's advantage is usually for journeys over 12 km (buses score for shorter journeys in terms of time taken from point to point), three-fourths of journeys in Delhi are shorter than 10 km. In other words, there's a natural ceiling to the traffic the Metro can capture. Professor Mohan cites figures to show that ridership is generally 20-25 per cent of a city's population, except in cities like Hong Kong and Singapore, which have a concentrated central business district and heavy population density. By contrast, Delhi has multiple business districts and, even when the Metro is fully spread out over 200 km, a Metro station will not be within walking distance for the bulk of the city's population, making it unattractive for short journeys. If traffic is going to always be well short of projections, affecting all cost-benefit analyses, it may be a good idea to re-examine alternatives.

It can be argued that it is too late for Delhi to look at alternatives such as the Bus Rapid Transit Systems (BRTS), since nearly Rs 11,000 crore has already been invested in the Metro, and the existing network will be properly used only if the network is fully developed. By this logic, any hope the Metro has of breaking even will get destroyed if an alternative is now built. Nevertheless, if a BRTS costs only Rs 10-15 crore a kilometre in terms of capital cost (less than 10 per cent of the Metro's), and can carry about as many passengers as the Metro on a similar route, as has been claimed (admittedly after substantial design changes are made in the city's roads, since the buses will run in dedicated lanes in the centre of the road), then this alternative is worth examining. It helps that BRTS stations, if built on the major arterial roads of the city, will be within walking distance of much of the population, given the spread of such roads across the city. Indeed, several cities in Brazil, Ecuador and China have been experimenting with the BRTS and the results appear encouraging. In the case of Kunming in China, the introduction of the BRTS has seen car traffic fall by a fifth and the share of bus transportation rise from 6 per cent to 13 per cent, while the speed of buses has risen from 9.6 km per hour to 15.2 kmph due to the use of dedicated corridors. Even if Delhi is not able to make a complete switch, given that it has opted for the Metro in a big way, all the other cities looking for mass transport solutions need to take a good hard look at alternatives to a metro.