Getting There?

As India’s urban population mushrooms and its elastic band of newly affluent develop a voracious appetite for consumer goods, its residents are now slowly tasting the sweet and the bitter fruits of development. Higher living standards come bundled with a degraded urban environment scarred by congestion, pollution, and megacities resembling vast construction sites.

Cars, big, sexy ones in particular, are symbols of a new wave of individualism taking root after decades of a largely restrictive era of import substitution, when the only cars known to most Indians were the ‘Amby’ and the Premier Padmini. But 21st century prosperity for India also brings horrible, unintended consequences like social stratification, obesity, and more unsettling, automobile dependency. More and more Indians are opting for individualised modes of transportation, abandoning our grimy, sluggish, creaking mass transit alternatives (trains, buses, and autorickshaws) for the freedom and privacy that gas-guzzling luxury sedans afford. Add that to the vast amount of freighted goods being trucked through cities, and you get hopelessly gridlocked.

Nowhere are the ripple effects felt more strongly than in New Delhi, the city that once led the dash for cleaner transport fuel (compressed natural gas) but is now home to a worrying 17 percent of India’s cars and rapidly choking on its own wealth. It’s all the more disturbing when Dinesh Mohan, professor and coordinator, Transport Research and Injury Prevention Programme, IIT Delhi, shows me data put together by the Texas Transportation Institute, which point to how congestion is on the rise globally, adding that contrary to popular belief, congestion is not something that can be managed. "If you want to stay put in your big, fancy SUVs you’ve got to live with congestion," says Mohan, who incidentally, is one of the chief architects of Delhi’s much maligned Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system. (More on that later.) "Either that, or you opt for a mass transit system. There are no other choices."

What is heartening, if only ever so slightly, is that the government seems to be taking Delhi’s traffic problems seriously, recognising that the city needs to make rapid, dramatic innovations to develop cleaner mass mobility solutions to sustain itself. The deputy chairman of India’s Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, has recently been tasked with the effort of drafting a ‘comprehensive policy’ on urban public transportation, one that should dovetail nicely with the National Urban Transport Policy (NUTP) and the Delhi Master Plan 2021—a source code of sorts for all the government-speak on Delhi’s dazzling array of urban transportation plans.

Are you one of those who has been left bewildered by the wide spectrum of public transport technologies being bandied about (the elevated monorail and skybus systems, the electric trolley buses, the BRT, the underground Metro, the Gurgaon expressway, the East-West corridor, a new airport at Greater Noida)—some of which have ruptured our already strained road system, perforated our prettiest parks, and pruned our sidewalks? Almost all of these have their underpinnings in the Delhi Master Plan.

Work in progress at Delhi's underground Metro

It must be said though, that a lot of these systems, like the Delhi Metro and even the bedevilled BRT, are based on unassailable logic, and although we’re still a long way off from our main mark as far as their implementation is concerned, Delhi can still claim some achievements. (New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, recently said that while developing his ambitious climate-change plan for NYC, he drew on Delhi’s experiences for its radical improvements in mass transit movements.) As for what advances in public transportation we can expect in Delhi’s future, here’s a look at some plans that might actually take flight.

Let’s start with what’s most likely.

Circa 2010, you could zip from the city’s centre to the new airport terminal in under 20 minutes, riding the Delhi Metro 19.5-km airport rail link, the shining centrepiece of its third phase. You will enjoy the added benefit of checking in your baggage at two ‘airport stations’ in central Delhi (Connaught Place and Shivaji Stadium). Each train will come with its own baggage car. The ride will cost you about Rs 180, about half the current cost of a cab ride to the airport. "Ideally, the Delhi Metro network should be within half a kilometre of every Delhiite," says E. Sreedharan, the Metro’s progenitor, "but the system would work far better if it was complemented with a high quality feeder system."

As part of its final heave towards South and East Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, and Ghaziabad, the Delhi Metro will be integrated, wherever possible, with the existing Ring Railway, a circular piece of track laid in the late 1970s, a point of pride for many Delhiites during the 1982 Asian Games. Although it has always offered a limited passenger service, the project never really gathered steam. Many Delhiites don’t even know ‘local trains’ exist in their city, so it comes as no surprise that only 12 trains run at a dismal 2 percent occupancy. These days, the tracks are used more as a freight corridor, so goods trains whistling through the city can skirt the busier passenger hubs at New Delhi, Old Delhi, and Hazrat Nizamuddin Railway Station.

But really, it’s a myth when they say Delhi isn’t a ‘railway city’ for this woefully underutilised diamond in the rough, which runs parallel to the Ring Road and has 24 stations in all, including stops at Sewa Nagar, Sarojini Nagar, Chanakyapuri, and Lajpat Nagar. Even some of Delhi’s best native raconteurs wouldn’t know, for instance, that while using Delhi’s extended rail network, you can ride from New Delhi Railway Station to Ghaziabad in about 40 minutes for under Rs 10! "With proper route rationalisation, increased frequency, cleaner and more accessible stations, the Ring Railway could act as a cost-effective alternative to the BRT," says Nalin Sinha, programme director of the Initiative for Transportation and Development Programmes (ITDP).

And what of the BRT, formerly known as the High Capacity Bus System (HCBS)? Okay, I concede that the system has brought chaos to commuters along the Delhi Gate-Ambedkar Nagar corridor, where it will soon be implemented. And four lives have needlessly been lost, thanks to poor signage and callous management.

But on paper, this radical plan to re-organise the city’s bus service is still an excellent idea. In a nutshell, it replaces the city’s dilapidated Blueline ‘killer’ buses, currently operating on a chaotic mesh of routes, with a fleet of energy-efficient buses travelling the main arteries on dedicated lanes linked to local feeder services. "It’s a far cheaper system since it makes use of existing infrastructure," says Sinha. "It helps balance your resources and re-organise road space, allocating areas for people who use it the most [Read: pedestrians and cyclists], so fast-moving traffic can flow freely. Most importantly, there is equity in this system, a space for everyone, something that is sorely lacking in most of our other transport reforms," Sinha emphasises.

Low-floor buses will replace Delhi's Blueline fleet

"The BRT is far better suited to a dense, widespread city like Delhi than the Metro," says Prof. P.K. Sarkar from the Department of Transport Planning, School of Planning and Architecture. "The problem is that politicians see the Metro as something glamorous. It’s a project that invites a lot of foreign participation, and Mr. Sreedharan has set such a high benchmark that despite its enormous cost, public support is squarely behind the project."

However, Delhi’s current BRT design is riddled with holes—no proper provision for pedestrians to cross, low segregating medians, and a disgruntled public conditioned against the usefulness of the system. Put it down to the inexperience of its ‘ideas people,’ a team largely comprising professors and students from IIT if you will, but huge bits of the BRT boondoggle are still missing. Dario Hidalgo, a senior transport engineer with the World Resources Institute (WRI), a Washington-based think-tank, recently visited a number of Indian cities, including Ahmedabad, and Indore—both of which are implementing a BRT system. In an email interview about his observations of Delhi’s BRT, Hidalgo said that Delhi’s design, while being "infrastructure oriented," can be improved to include standard BRT features like centralised control, prepayment, etc. So it’s probably a good thing then that Chief Minister Sheila Dixit suspended the sanctions for BRT work to begin on five other corridors in the city, until progress on this ‘demonstration corridor’ is up to speed.

We like other transportation measures for sentimental reasons. The favourite is, of course, the Light Rail Transit (LRT) system or modernised trams to be reintroduced in congested areas like the Walled City, Chawri Bazaar, and Karol Bagh by 2010, at an estimated cost of about Rs 150 crore. Also, last August, the Delhi High Court ordered the state government to explore the possibility of reintroducing double-decker buses in the city to augment the existing fleet of buses to 11,000. (Sources suggest we’re more likely to see the low-floor energy-efficient variety on our streets since they are easier to maneuver.)

Less likely, but yet to be ruled out, is the proposal to introduce Electric Trolley buses. These 100-seat buses require a continuous power supply, modification of the existing road surface, electricity poles, and traffic signals at intersections. So there will be more disruptions if their implementation comes into effect.

Delhi’s Transport Minister Haroon Yusuf is also keen on erecting in the Walled City (his own constituency) a monorail, like the one in Kuala Lumpur, as a feeder system for the Metro. How this grand, cost-intensive design (Rs 35-40 crores per kilometre) with little aesthetic value will help ease congestion in the city is debatable. In the world over, monorails are employed mainly in amusement parks and tourist destinations, which the Walled City most certainly is not.

"Some of these are excellent public transport initiatives, giving people cheap mobility options," says Sunita Narain, director of the Centre for Science and Environment. "But they must be coupled with stringent norms for private cars as well. Control the number of licenses issued, charge high road taxes for driving and high parking fees to let systems like the Metro pay for itself, and simultaneously discourage people from buying cheaper cars," she says. There’s also a latent power in voluntary events like Seoul’s car-free days and even the ‘Batti Bandh’ electricity conservation campaign in tiny pockets of Mumbai and Bangalore, which gets people to see that there can be a greener, cleaner, energy-saving way. Perhaps it’s time for Delhi to adopt some of these practices.

India’s car lobby says the automobile industry accounts for a huge chunk of India’s GDP and it is poised to create 25 million additional jobs by 2016. In an op-ed piece for the Hindustan Times, Dilip Chenoy, director general of the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers, wrote that India has the second largest road network in the world behind the US. "Japan has seven times the number of vehicles [that India has] but one-third of the road length; Brazil twice and China thrice the number of vehicles but with just half the road length," he says, adding that concerns about cars outpacing the growth in road development are "incorrect and misleading." His argument only highlights the skewed car-centric approach that most of our transport reforms take, ignoring the golden rule of thumb that roads must be lengthened to carry more people, not additional cars.

It is a very exciting, and a very frightening, time for India and its capital, depending on your vantage point. You want to celebrate a watershed moment for Indian industry—developing the super-cheap Nano. Yet you still bemoan the impact of its use—the hidden costs Indians will have to bear in terms of traffic congestion, air pollution, and deteriorating health. Can strong policies lend teeth to public transport and simultaneously discourage private vehicles and cut a new, greener path for our cities? Or will the government succumb to populist forces and crumble under pressure from an influential car lobby and those of us eager to lap up cheap versions of the worst Western inventions? Either way, the changes have got to be from the ground up. It’s simple stuff, really. No more poking fun at the electric Reva. No more feeling smug and morally superior to the 4x4. (A traffic jam of dinky Marutis is still a traffic jam.) And every time you reach for the car keys to set out somewhere, answer the overriding question, if you really need to go by car. Or go at all.