TRANSPORT PLANNING
Transforming Urban Transportation Small Innovations, Big Returns
T
he last decade has seen a drop in public transport mode-share across all Indian cities. The fear-mongering about the coronavirus spread further dented the appeal of city bus services. However, when the services were gradually reinstated, ridership in most city bus systems rebounded to 65-95% of the pre-lockdown levels despite many educational and workplaces still not operational. This is both an indicator of resilience and also of how integral the bus service is to the lives of many citizens. The question now is how to transform the urban transportation landscape to at least recover the lost ground over the last 10 years. Top-most on every urban passenger’s travel decision making is (a) Reliability of bus service, (b) Affordability, and followed by (c) Accessibility. While comfort of travel is also important, it falls much lower in the order of what is desirable. Thus, switching buses to ‘electric’ (or ‘CNG’) from other fuels doesn’t do a thing to improve public transport. Yet, such technologies increase the cost of providing service. If the public transport mode-share continues to fall, as it did in the past decade, buses, even if electric, will run empty and add to congestion; thus increasing the overall emissions from transport.
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Prashanth Bachu Urban Planning Specialist Gear Change
Let us see what it takes to improve the critical aspects of travel decision making (explained in figure 1). Both infrastructure and policy changes are not within the domain of the transit agencies. Knowing that the most significant gains in reducing costs and increasing ridership are only possible with technology solutions, transit STUs/SPVs started investing in Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). In the past decade, transit agencies across the country spent Rs.1000+ crore ($150+ million) in procuring ITS with the objectives of achieving service reliability and efficiency. Yet, all this expense proved to be in vain. Even today, none of the 40+ cities using ITS have been able to: • Access travel data and analytics to improve bus planning & operations efficiency • Show bus location/arrival data on Google Maps • Deploy a smart-card/cashless ticketing with substantial adoption ITS deployments not only failed in value addition but also failed in reliably capturing essential operational parameters, because of which bus operators continued to keep manual records as was always done. Thus, instead of solving existing challenges, ITS deployments rather
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