May 2008 Edition
Minus social marketing, BRT suffers here. But look how the world is taking to buses.
Umesh Anand
New Delhi
A PROJECT meant to carve out a bus corridor and give edestrians and cyclists designated space on a 16 km stretch of road in Delhi has resulted in outbursts of anger and acrimony by middle class car owners. Called the bus rapid transit system or the BRT, the roject is aimed at making it easier to move around in Delhi, where traffic is unruly. In the absence of public transport, the number of personal two-wheelers and cars has kept on increasing, making it difficult now to drive and park.
The BRT has been adopted in cities worldwide because it is cheaper than a metro railway, uses road space in a socially equitable anner, reduces door-todoor travel time, brings down pollution levels and provides an incentive to shift from personal to public ransport.The BRT and physically segregated busways have changed the way people travel in Mexico, Curitiba, Paris, Nice, Jakarta, Bogota, Quito, Seoul, Taipei and several other cities. BRTs for Manhattan and London are on the drawing board because of this experience. International experts, high-power committees and providers of infrastructure finance have over the years vetted the Delhi project and found merit in it.
After the first stretch from Ambedkar Nagar to Delhi Gate, five other
corridors are planned.
Roads account for 21 per cent of Delhi's total area, which is high by
international standards. An estimated 60 per cent of the motorised commuting
trips are made by mass transit, the majority being by bus. But buses represent
less than one per cent of the total motorised vehicles. Cars and two-wheelers represent 90 per cent of the motorised vehicles.
It is common knowledge that several thousand people die or get injured in
road accidents every year. They are mostly pedestrians or cyclists for whom
there is no space on the roads though an estimated 40 per cent of Delhi's
citizens walk or cycle to work.
A BRT that ushers in low-floor buses in a central stream, creates space for pedestrians and cyclists and gives cars a separate corridor clearly seems to be an answer to Delhi's traffic problems.But for the past six months or so a campaign in the media, prompted by vocalmiddle class resident welfare associations in south Delhi, has sought to condemn the BRT and have it shelved. The campaign has also personally targeted Dinesh Mohan and Geetam Tiwari, transportation planners at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), who have been responsible for designing the project. One reason clearly is that the middle class and rich in Delhi are hesitant to acknowledge the rights of poorer people who come to the city and provide services in the unorganised sector. A bus system, cycle lanes and so on give them a new legitimacy. BRT is more than just a transportation project: it is a reorientation of the city's priorities.
Another reason for the outcry is the complete absence of social marketing of the BRT concept as being world class. No attempt seems to have been made to win people over to the BRT idea. In the absence of signage and traffic police, motorists have not understood how to use the new configurations that have emerged, as it were, from nowhere on an important artery. For months ogether now, while work has been in progress between Ambedkar Nagar and Delhi Gate, motorists have found themselves caught in a confusing maze of new lanes. Buses, as is their style in the Capital, have done pretty much as they please. The result has been excruciating traffic jams with vehicles looking for escape routes through nearby residential colonies. Ask a south Delhi motorist about the BRT and the response will invariably be very negative. To the average person no good can possibly come out of such chaos. The project seems to be in just too much of a mess.
THE GLOBAL EXPERIENCE
Interestingly, BRTs the world over have run into opposition at the project implementation stage. Getting a BRT going has invariably been difficult and even painful. The proponents of the system have had to face public anger. Politicians and administrators have had to work at street level to assuage feelings and solve real time problems of usage. In Bogota, the iconic former Mayor, Enrique Penalosa, made the use of roads a political issue, finally leading to a referendum in which people brought in a bus system, chose to make roads traffic-free during certain hours and so on.
Penalosa says that in the developing world, improving transportation is a
political and economic challenge. It requires creating greaterequity in cities and
making services more inclusive. "Urban transport is a political rather than a technical issue. The technical
aspects are simple," says Penalosa.
In the absence of similar leadership people in Delhi have not been able to
redefine their city. Caught up in the chaos that accompanies a project in the
making, Delhi's middle class has not had an opportunity to understand what a
public transport system under the BRT can do to make commuting safer,
cleaner and more efficient.
MOHAN'S MERCEDES
As academicians, Mohan and Tiwari have been handicapped in presenting their case. They have countered criticism of the BRT with the charge that the rich and middle class, particularly those in the media, don't care how the majority travel. This may not be incorrect, but their response has only served to make the criticism more strident and even personal. Much, for instance, has been made of Mohan owning a Mercedes and turning up in it at a cycle rally at a BRT location. It is true Mohan owns a Mercedes, but it is ancient, was bought second hand and can hardly be categorised as a gleaming set of wheels owned by a man about town. It is also a fact that Mohan has cycled and walked three km to work at IIT for decades, though given his professional standing he could quite legitimately be very wealthy.
Just how acrimonious matters have got can be judged from a hilarious email Mohan received from a reporter. It went like this: "Dear Professor Mohan: Is it true that you participated in the symbolic trial run on the cycle track at the BRT corridor on Sunday 13th April '2008? Is it also true that you, a votary of public transport, came for the trial in a Mercedes Benz car instead of a DTC or a Blueline bus? If owning a car that too a Mercedes Benz is thought to be a necessity by you, why have you peddled the contaminated idea of pedal power to Delhi Government? You would also appreciate that it is very unusual for an IIT professor to own a Mercedes Benz. We would be grateful if you clarify the ownership of the vehicle? If you own it, what was the source of funds for buying the vehicle? This mail is being sent to you as you refused to reply the same queries to mediapersons in Delhi Secretariat on Tuesday 15th April 2008."
NOT TWO PLANNERS ALONE
It is hardly fair to target Mohan and Tiwari. Ownership of the BRT needs to be traced to successive governments, a policy on sustainable transport and evaluation by the Infrastructure Development and Finance Corporation (IDFC). Implementation of the project is being done by RITES. The management of the BRT comes under a joint venture between the Delhi government and IDFC.This company has only recently come into existence and is yet to settle down to managing the project. It also hasn't been given the sweeping powers that have been bestowed on the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC).
The BRT for Delhi has been checked out and approved of by international experts: Alan Hoffman, founder/principal the Mission Group, San Diego, California; Prof Hermann Knoflacher of the Technical University of Vienna; Lee Sims, director of the IBI Group in Toronto. These experts attended a government workshop on the project in 2005. They examined design details and visited the entire corridor. The concept of a BRT for Delhi dates back to 2002 when the Delhi Transport Corporation held an international workshop attended by several foreign and Indian experts and Penalosa himself to share his experience in Bogota.
The decision to have a BRT was announced at that workshop, which was organised in collaboration with the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) and IDFC. Thereafter, a committee on sustainable transport was set up and recommended at the end of 2002 that BRT be introduced on five corridors in Delhi. The first corridor is the current one, which begins at Ambedkar Nagar and goes to Delhi Gate and then the Inter- tate Bus Terminal (ISBT). It was only after this rather detailed groundwork and collective decision-making that IIT and RITES were given the responsibility of designing and implementing the system.
RECENT CRITICISM
"Thus far everyone in government and even in the media was all praise for buses. In fact we would be repeatedly asked when the project was going to be implemented," says Tiwari in the seventh floor office of the Transport Research and Injury Prevention Programme (TRIPP) which is led by Mohan at the IIT in Delhi. "The criticism has been only in the past few months and it shows a omplete disdain for the facts. It is not true that work on the BRT is causing deaths. If you look at the records the number of deaths on that stretch has actually gone down," she says. When a BRT is put in place, the number of deaths from accidents actually goes down, she points out, because pedestrians and cyclists are taken off the road and buses and cars have their own channels.
Mohan argues that once a project in the public interest has been thought through and it has been decided to implement it, it is important for everyone to go along and make it work, particularly when it is something as difficult to implement as a change is road usage. The traffic police in Delhi have been conspicuous by their absence at the BRT location. Tiwari and Mohan say that several attempts to brief the police have only elicited the response that the space for cars is being reduced. There seems to be no attempt to understand a better urban transportation model.
BETTER THAN METRO
The BRT comes at a mere fraction of the cost of a Metro Railway. It is also faster from door to door because studies show that people in Indian cities tend to make shorter trips. The Delhi Metro with a network of about 60 km accounts for just about two per cent of the local commuter trips.Mohan says the original feasibility of the Delhi Metro was based on 3.1 million passengers using it by 2005. "The system is actually operating at 0.6 million passengers per day at the end of 2007," he says. This apart, the Delhi Metro has done othing to reduce surface congestion and air pollution, which were both avowed goals. The BRT not only meets these urban challenges, it serves the largest number of people.
For instance, the young and the old who cannot be expected to be
driving cars, need a system by which they can move safely from point to point
over short distances. They need space on the road to walk and cycle. They, as do
women, could do with better street lighting. The design of the BRT provides for
all this.
But despite all these benefits, few people in Delhi know what the BRT can do
for improving their lives and a great many
others are hoping that it fails.
As final trials begin and the stage is set
for a launch on May 1, chances are that the
BRT will run smack into further
opposition. In the absence of coordinated
efforts by agencies responsible for
governing Delhi and citizens' groups, the
BRT could even collapse because of the many hurdles associated with its
implementation.
But then what is the solution? The
Metro, for all the hype around it, is too
costly and masses debt. Studies show that
it doesn't meet the commuter needs of
Delhi.
Traffic as it exists today is so chaotic that if new systems are not put in place traffic jams are going to only get worse and moving around in the city is going to be even more difficult over the years. It is recorded that despite the switch to CNG and the creation of the Metro, pollution levels resulting from the rampant use of personal transport, are continuing to rise. Delhi ranks as one of the unhealthy cities in the world with cancer and asthma directly linked to pollutants in the air. Finally, no city can hope to flourish unless it provides services required by the majority of its inhabitants.
In Delhi, the truth is that the majority live in slums and serve in the unorganised sector. Attempts have been made to push them out, but the reality is that they will go nowhere because the city is where people come to earn a living. It is no different in cities any where else in the world and Delhi's future depends on calmly redefining its civic priorities. An efficient and inclusive transport is just one of the many things that Delhi will have to achieve if it seriously wants to be considered a world class city. And as the world turns to buses, the question is whether Delhi can any longer afford to miss the bus.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
 |
Newsvine |  |
del.icio.us |
|
Disclaimer
The views expressed here are strictly personal and civilsocietyonline.com does not necessarily subscribe to them. We shall endeavour to upload/publish as many of the comments that are submitted as possible within a reasonable span of time, but we do not guarantee that all comments that are submitted will be uploaded/published. Messages that harass, abuse or threaten other members; have obscene, unlawful, defamatory, libellous, hateful, or otherwise objectionable content; or have spam, commercial or advertising content or links are liable to be removed by the editors. We also reserve the right to edit the comments that do get published. Please do not post any private information unless you want it to be available publicly.
Your feedback on this story...
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
About Us | Site Map | Privacy Policy | Contact Us | ©2007 Civil Society
.
........................................Webmaster Vishwanathan ( vishu4@rediffmail.com )
