As a new government settles in, albeit largely unchanged from the one before, it is time to address where the governance agenda needs change, starting with urban transport.
Despite the Modi government’s much-vaunted achievements in infrastructure over the last decade, including high-profile projects like metros and bullet trains, roads across urban India are still choking. The challenge now is to make tough decisions and implement innovative infrastructure solutions to overcome the legacy of a decade of missed opportunities.
Every urban master plan has lofty objectives of increasing the share of all journeys made by public transport. Yet, the result is the opposite, with cars and, more significantly, two-wheelers taking prominence. In this scenario, the past offers something of a roadmap.
Sustainable travel—meaning the share of trips by walking, cycling, and public transport—is one measure of the health of a transport system.
By that measure, taking Chennai as an example, sustainable travel made up 95 per cent of all trips, with buses alone at 42 per cent, in 1970. But by 2018, sustainable travel had dropped to 55 per cent in Chennai, with buses at 22 per cent.
While the actual number of trips by buses increased, the prominence of other modes is what shows up in congestion. The share of car journeys has more than tripled to 7 percent. But the explosive growth has been in two-wheelers, which accounted for nearly 30 percent of all trips—fifteen times higher than in 1970.
This is the story of every city in India.
Look at old Bollywood movies, even from the 1970s, and you get a very different picture of Mumbai. Amol Palekar’s Chhoti Si Baat was shot extensively on the streets with hardly any traffic to be seen. Older movies from the 1950s used Marine Drive as a backdrop. Watch CID or Kala Bazar and you can see what traffic looked like.
Successive master plans in Chennai lay out objectives to increase sustainable travel, as do similar plans in every city in India. Yet, the results are similar everywhere, with cars and two-wheelers growing at the expense of every other form of transport.
Before getting overly despondent, we should remember that this is not India’s story alone but that of most countries in the world. The challenge in India, though, is that poor urbanisation—of which poor urban transport is an example—is now a barrier to economic growth, hindering connectivity to jobs and markets. But there are exceptions from where we can learn lessons. London is one.
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Metros are not a panacea
In the last two decades, the share of sustainable travel in London has increased from 53 per cent to 63 per cent, with a target of reaching 80 per cent by 2041. The interventions implemented to achieve these results offer a path forward for India. However, let’s first address the challenges in India.
India’s urbanisation followed a straightforward path—minimal spending on road infrastructure, provision of a basic bus service, and reliance on private vehicles for those who could afford them. This strategy worked well for a long time, but as income levels rose and more private vehicles appeared, congestion worsened. The first place where this was visible was in New Delhi, the city that most benefitted from growth.
At this point, India flipped from the lowest-cost infrastructure to the most expensive. The urban infrastructure story over the last quarter-century has been defined by a focus on building metros—perhaps even an obsessive focus. Today, India has about 850 kilometres of operating metro railways, with another 500 kilometres or so under planning or construction. About half of that operational network is in Delhi alone.
By comparison, London as a single city has over 1,000 kilometres of metro lines. So, we can keep constructing metros – and we should – but it is not the panacea for urbanisation that we need, not least because the pace of metro building can never match up to the growing demand for public transport.
So, where is the answer?
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In praise of buses
The fact remains that even in cities with dense metro systems, bus networks play an outsized, if under-appreciated, role.
In London this year, buses will carry nearly 2 billion journeys, while the London Underground will carry 1.3 billion. All rail services operated by Transport for London, including the Underground, will total perhaps 1.8 billion. If we add all other suburban rail services, the number rises to 2.4 billion.
By any measure, buses play a big role. Visitors to London may not appreciate this because the touristy parts of central London are so heavily dominated by the Underground. Move out a bit, though, and the story changes with every mile, with buses and cars playing a more visible role.
London is not alone in the prominence of buses. In ultra-dense Hong Kong, the MTR metro carried 1.7 billion journeys in 2023, but buses weren’t far behind at 1.3 billion.
In Latin America, the picture flips. Despite Mexico City’s 12 metro lines, the 25,000 or so buses swamp the system. Sao Paulo started building metros only after they had exhausted capacity on the bus network with extensive bus lanes. Other cities have forsaken metros in favour of bus rapid transit (BRT). A BRT experiment that started with Curitiba in Brazil has become the template for much of Latin America and has been implemented most extensively in Bogota, Colombia.
Similarly, China’s investment in metros has been matched by its investment in bus services. With over 4,000 kilometres of metros, China now has the most extensive urban rail network, but its 700,000 public buses are also the biggest fleet worldwide. Both Beijing and Shanghai rank among the top in the world for the length and usage of their metros. And yet, Beijing’s 830 kilometres of subway and its 25,000 buses both carried a similar number of journeys of just under 4 billion each. China’s bus system has also led the world in electric vehicle deployment.
Cities around the world have recognised the primacy of buses in their transport systems. In India, this remains a missed opportunity despite attempts to bring it centre stage.
Going back to Chennai, we have a direct comparison that shows the misallocation of limited financial resources. Chennai has a decent bus service with about 3,500 buses. This fleet carries 32 lakh passengers per day and has an operating loss of Rs 571 crore. This translates to an operating subsidy of Rs 5 per trip.
The business plan for the Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC), the bus company in Chennai, shows them aiming to double ridership and reduce the need for operating subsidy over the next five years. What it needs is investment in a doubling of the fleet and conversion to electric buses. The total investment required: about Rs 2,000 crore. In some respects, this projection of growth is something we have seen in the past. The danger is that without the investment, we will see the same results as before—declining ridership.
Now compare this with the investment being put into the Chennai Metro. Some Rs 12,000 crore has already been spent, with another Rs 6,000 crore expenditure just on phase 1. Despite this investment, the metro carries 2 lakh passengers per day and loses Rs 103 crore. That amounts to an operating subsidy of Rs 30 per journey, six times higher than that on buses, never mind the capital expenditure.
The irony here is that we starve a bus system that is the real workhorse while pouring money into metros with little by way of returns. At the very least, we ought to look at the efficiency of capital investment.
The lesson from London is that a coordinated set of interventions led to an increase in sustainable travel, with buses at the heart of it. That is what we need in India – a focus on buses. And if you doubt that, go back to Chhoti Si Baat and see how good the bus service looked in Mumbai.
Shashi Verma is Chief Technology Officer at Transport for London. Views are personal.
This article is the first part of a series that will examine how the government should address issues in urbanisation and urban infrastructure.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)
Idea to be seriously thought over by the @nitiayog – facts explained in the articles seems to be very convincing.