WNARENDRA MODI HEN became India’s prime minister in 2014, the country’s entire metro-rail network spanned 229 km (142 miles) in four and a half cities: Bangalore, Delhi, Gurgaon (a satellite of Delhi), Calcutta and Mumbai. This was less than half the length of the Shanghai Metro at the time. Yet Mr. Modi’s government has since presided over a massive expansion of the metropolitan network. Last April, the Indian network covered 870 km in 18 cities.
Around 1,000 additional kilometers of metro tracks are under construction in 27 cities. A little less than 6 km of new tracks are put into service each month. Navi Mumbai, a satellite of Mumbai, became the latest city to boast of a metro when its first line opened in November. Yet while the speed and scale of India’s metro construction over the past decade has been impressive, the passenger figures associated with it are dismal.
According to a study by Geetam Tiwari and Deepty Jain of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, none of India’s metro systems have achieved even half of their planned ridership. Only their own city’s network, which is the longest and most extensive in India, comes close, at 47%. In Mumbai and Calcutta, attendance is a third of what was expected. In most other cities it is in the single or double digits. In India’s congested technology and traffic capital Bangalore, the first line of a high-profile metro is attracting only 6% of its planned ridership. This is despite the fact that the average car speed during rush hour in Bangalore is 18 km/h, the slowest of any major city in London, according to TomTom, a navigation software company.
These catastrophic figures are all the more surprising considering the lack of decent public transport in most Indian cities and the YIMBYthe local enthusiasm that these infrastructure projects tend to generate. The consequences of this failure on income are disastrous. In keeping with the august tradition of Indian Railways, no metro system makes enough money to cover its expenses, according to another study by Sandip Chakrabarti of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.
Solving the problem is crucial not only from an economic point of view, but also from an environmental point of view. As India’s middle class grows, those who can afford it are opting for the relative comfort of private vehicles. The result is worsening traffic congestion and pollution. IQAir, an air quality monitoring organization, estimates that emissions from motor vehicles account for between a fifth and a third of concentrations of PM2.5 – a particularly damaging type of air pollutant – in urban India.
What explains commuters’ reluctance to board their brand-new, delightfully air-conditioned subway cars? For starters, Indian cities aren’t particularly dense, meaning metro lines aren’t walkable for most commuters. Feeder services, such as bus lines, are rarely integrated with metro lines. So, taking the metro to work can be complicated and require walking, buses, shared rickshaws and even more walking.
A second reason is that metro systems are better suited to longer journeys. In the Indian context, they only save time on journeys of 10 km or more, Mr. Tiwari and Mr. Jain believe. But about three-quarters of trips in most Indian cities are less than 10 km, and half less than 5 km. Metro fares also tend to be high by Indian standards. The last time Delhi Metro increased its fares, in 2017, ridership fell by 15%.
Transportation analysts and urban planners say India is on the wrong horse. Bus services are much cheaper and more flexible for route planning than subways. They can also be deployed quickly. The emergence of electric buses has also made them a greener option. The best way to maximize these benefits is to create dedicated bus lanes, known as “bus rapid transit.” Yet attempts to implement such systems have often failed, due to poor implementation, timid enforcement, resistance from motorists and a lack of political will. The gap in attitudes toward buses and subways is easily explained, says Devashish Dhar, whose book “India’s Blind Spot” examines these urban problems: “Buses are not sexy. Subways are sexy.
The result is a slew of expensive transportation infrastructure that fails to attract passengers, even as poorer commuters walk in the heat and richer ones sit idle in traffic. Mr. Modi and his advisors did well to build so many metro lines. They now need to make them more convenient to use and improve India’s urban bus networks.■
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