BRTS
Hubali-Dharwad BRTS: New Bus Rapid Transit System makes travel faster, safer and more convenient
Nupur Gupta Sr. Transport Specialist The World Bank
T
he twin cities of HubaliDharwad, the second-largest urban cluster in Karnataka, have transformed the travel experience of commuters along a major city artery by introducing a new central corridor exclusively for public buses.
Not surprisingly, within a year of its launch, bus ridership along the critical corridor has grown to 90,000 passengers a day. One in five passengers has switched from other modes of transport, and commuter satisfaction has soared from 56 to 85.5 percent. Other traffic has benefited as well. Private vehicles now have twice the number of lanes for their use – increasing from two to four – enabling traffic to flow much faster and more smoothly.
The state-of-the-art Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) between the commercial hub at Hubali and the educational and administrative center at Dharwad has made public buses faster, more convenient, comfortable and reliable , in addition to being safer for women.
Importantly, the corridor has proved to be a cost-effective alternative to expensive metro systems. Built at an expense of Rs. 970 crores (US$150 million) - or roughly Rs. 44 crores per kilometer ($ 6-7 million) – the BRTS has worked out to less than one-tenth the cost of a metro.
New air-conditioned buses now run every few minutes along the 22 km long route, halving the hour-long commute by express services. Regular buses too have shaved 15 minutes off their earlier time.
The project has the potential to be a game changer for urban mobility in the country . It has been declared the ‘Best Mass Transit Project’ by the Government of India.
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Urban Transport Infrastructure // MARCH 2020
began implementing Bus Rapid Transit Systems (BRTS) with great enthusiasm a decade ago, the idea - which originated in Latin America - gradually lost steam across the country, despite successes in Indore and Ahmedabad. This was for a number of reasons: national funding for BRTS projects dried up, the projects proved to be more complex to implement than previously thought, and Delhi’s decision to abort its own experiment raised questions about the concept’s efficacy. So, what differently?
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Hubali-Dharwad
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Strategically identified First, the corridor was planned along a major city artery where 70 percent of commuters used city buses. However, public buses made up less than 10 percent of the passenger vehicles plying along the route. It, therefore, made sense to widen the four-lane highway into an WWW.URBANTRANSPORTNEWS.COM
