Navigating Urban Transport Challenges: A Comprehensive Review and Critical Analysis

India’s population is rising and it is predicted that India will be the most populous country in the world by 2027. Moreover, the population is increasing more in the urban areas than the rural areas due to migration etc. This calls for capacity building and infrastructure development in urban areas as a keen attention. Infrastructural capacity has to be increased owing to the needs of the population as urbanism gets more prominent. Since transportation is a crucial part of the infrastructure and modern societies dwell upon it, it requires special consideration.

Developed countries have a more thorough transportation system as compared to the developing countries. According to Reddy (1995), rise in personal vehicles is due to population and inefficiency in public transportation system. The author further states that the traffic contributes to greater air pollution (due to frequent stops, acceleration, deceleration, etc. which result in increased fuel consumption and exhaust pollution) and often Mass Rapid Transit System are given as a solution to these problems but they themselves come at the cost of a lot of energy consumption.

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According to Mitra (2006), Mass Transport (Public Transport) is cheaper, less congestive (as it has its own dedicated area) & eco-friendly while private transport is more comfortable (as one does not walk to the station) and convenient (as one does not wait).Private transport is any mode of transport used for private purposes like cars, motorbikes, cycles, taxis, etc. Mass Rapid Transit System (MRTS) is a kind of transportation system in which electric rails run on dedicated corridors on which they have exclusive right of way.

No other pedestrian or vehicle comes on it and it has a high carrying capacity. It is generally designed for the urban areas which have a high population of commuters.

Indian cities being more densely populated seem more suited for Mass transportation but a paradoxical situation is that the cities with more population density are witnessing a rise in private transportation (Mitra, 2006). This is mainly because policies still seem to be biased towards the private transportation in India for instance vehicle loans and cheap parking. Furthermore, growth of middle class will continue to increase private vehicles thus a policy shift towards public transport (at the expense of private transport) may save us from inevitable.

According to Badami (2006), sometimes the argument is that there is not enough space to expand the Public transport, but failure in Public transport will increase Private vehicles which will demand more space. With exception of Hong Kong, Tokyo and New York, where population served is very high; Metro rails continue to be financially unviable, thus experts hold that any infrastructural project must be supported as it is unsustainable socially and economically.

This brings us to the policy dilemma related to the MRTS, that whether to introduce it in urban cities or not. Moreover, on what criteria it should be introduced? Ministry of Urban Development has said that any city with a population more than that of 3 million should have a Metro Rail System, but many experts have expressed a doubt on it. According to Ramachandraiah (2007) any public transportation model should be specific to the peculiarities of that city.

According to Mohan (2013), Most of our urban planning is inspired from USA, but this is unviable. Our cities have a different structure, which mainly consists of 3 parts - City A was the existing city when the British came, city B was the city developed by the British themselves for them (like civil lines, etc.) and city C which was the city developed after independence by the Indian State (Mohan, 2013). So the expansion has occurred irregularly and mostly over the periphery. Moreover, Metro is seen to be successful in the cities which have the employment prospects in the centre of the city (Mohan, 2013). But this is not the case with the Indian cities, as they have developed irregularly and employment is dispersed.

Moreover, USA boasts a good automobile and aviation sector, but lags behind in the railways. Experts hold that this is because of the lobbies in favour of the 2 sectors. If government will spend more money in the railways, the profit will decline in the other 2 sectors. But this is something that the capitalists do not desire. However in India’s case, seeing the population and the poverty, we cannot imagine a bad railway sector. Hence the blind imitation of any society is not commendable.

According to Kundu (2011), due to Globalisation, rural poor has to take shelter in the slums and the city periphery and the process of formalisation in urban areas has reduced the opportunity of the rural poor to assimilate in the urban spaces. Often when such projects are undertaken, the urban poor are displaced. Author claims that in this way there has been an “Exclusionary Urbanisation”. Metro Rail is not essentially an energy efficient Mass Transit System rather an infrastructure project linked to the process of gentrification, led by neo-liberal imagination of restructuring urban spaces to accumulate capital that is followed by a series of dispossessions. The issue of gentrification is widely discussed with respect to such capital-intensive projects as the prices rise near the establishments. The gated communities are also frequently setup. Moreover, the routes are also designed so as to suit the middle class priorities (Randhawa, 2012).

According to Badami (2009), urban transportation policy in India favours some modes of transportation at the expense of others. The author states that an urban transportation policy which actively discriminates against the other modes of transportation can only exacerbate the access, time loss and safety for the users of those modes and particularly the urban poor . The author accuses policy-makers of suffering from ‘car windshield view’ and ‘vehicular apartheid’. Cycle-pedestrian infrastructure is quite underdeveloped in India and this discriminates against them in the socio-economic spheres.

According to Tara (2011), generally the transportation and infrastructure policies are money-centric and oblivious to gender concerns. A lot of harassment happens in the public places and public transport is no exception. The boarding and de-boarding defeats the purpose of reserved seats in public vehicles as the harassment is more at that time, and women do not mind standing if they are not harassed (Tara, 2011). Metro came as a saviour for women security but with increase in congestion again it got unsafe. Women’s coaches have provided a sense of security to women as they are a private sphere within the public sphere but it is a form of “Doing Gender”. The good thing about these reserved coaches is that they have also given women an opportunity to exercise authority when they tell men not to enter and the women squad of DMRC also mainly consists of lower-middle women who exercise authority which they rarely do at home. Within a gender, the experiences of urban and rural women differ starkly in the transport, as the needs and education levels of them are different.

The Lucknow Metro got approval for project in 2015. 2 corridors were proposed for the metro in the city – East-West and North-South (in the Detailed Project Report). Some part of the North-South corridor started in September 2017 and the whole corridor started in March 2019. The project was funded by both State and Central Governments in equal proportion. Owing to the political will, project got completed in a short span of time. Lucknow Metro along with Kochi Metro is fastest completed Metro project in India. Lucknow Metro Rail Corporation Limited (LMRCL) is running under loss and the main reason for this is that people are not turning up. The city has almost all types of modes of transportation from electric buses to electric rickshaws.

BRTS is a transportation system which consists of the fleet of the buses. It has a dedicated corridor for the buses and generally gives priority to the buses at the intersections. One can argue it is a bus based alternative of the Metro rail. According to Mohan (2008), BRTS is more time saving in short distance trips. Many experts hold that BRTS can be of more avail in many cities than MRTS. But in Ahmadabad BRTS has not shown expected results.

The general assumption is that to avoid traffic and congestion roads should be expanded and increased. But this is not true according to Down-Thomson Paradox. This theory states that the equilibrium speed of car traffic on a road is determined by the average door-to-door speed on the equivalent journey by the public transport. In simple terms, it says that increasing roads will not lead to decrease in traffic. This is because the public transport and private transport are quite related to each other and people in advanced countries prefer less time in journeys. So, if more roads will be there, it will decrease the travel time by the private vehicles and this people will shift to the private vehicles at the expense of the public transport. In this way traffic will again become prominent. Hence the paradox is that increasing roads will not reduce traffic. So, the solution is that the public transport has to be made convenient and more investment is to be done on it. General public will prefer more convenient mode of transport as the country will develop. Hence the policy-makers have to acknowledge different modes of transportations have a relation to each other.

In 2014, Ministry of Urban Development (GOI) came up with the NUTP to have a vision in the development function of the transportation in India. It talks about curbing greenhouse gas emission, cycle-pedestrian safety, etc. Its vision is to induce economic growth with low carbon footprint. It envisages a people-centric transport system. It adopts ‘avoid-shift-improve’ model for switching to public transport over private one. It means to avoid travelling in length and number of trips, shift from personal vehicles to non motorised vehicles like MRTS and improve clean fuels and clean vehicle technology.

Planning should include both the city and the peri-urban areas and the regions around the city, which for legal purpose should be notified as local planning or metropolitan area. It calls for Transit orient development (TOD) and advocates MRTS. TOD is a system of transportation in which MRTS or BRTS occupy a central figure. It acknowledges the discrimination against the cyclists-pedestrians on roads and calls for equitable allocation of road space.

It also envisages the role of para-transit vehicles as integration to the other modes of transportation. Para-transit vehicles are auto-rickshaws, tempos, etc. ‘First and last mile connectivity’ is the connectivity from the station to the house. This is often underdeveloped in India and is also a factor for lack of safety in transportation sphere. Often women face harassment in the areas around the stations, localities, alleys and around, especially during late night. Though the NUTP acknowledges these issues, there seems to be a void in the implementation.

There is a lot of research gap in the field of transportation and urban planning. Moreover, social scientists have not dwelled upon this domain as much as the engineers and managers have done. Consequently, the knowledge in the domain is quite oblivious to the subaltern needs. Furthermore, no relevant study on Lucknow Metro has been conducted yet. Some research questions are:

There are various issues related to transportation. Environmental, social, economical, political, technological and ethical issues abound it. The challenge is to not let one outweigh the other as striking the balance between them is not easy. Therefore State has to come up with prudent policies to address these issues. Metro projects have done good and not so good at different places. But they cannot be seen as ultimate problem solver or last resort of transportation planning. Most of the Middle Class did not have air-conditioned cars till 1970s and moreover, cars were noisy and passengers were exposed to fumes; under such condition rail was a convenient mode of transport and therefore Metro was demanded by the Middle Class.

Now cars are much more luxurious than trains and 2 wheelers are cheaper, so the only appeal left is speed and predictability. Therefore recognising the changing patterns of consumption, viability of Metro is also changed. Furthermore technology is coming with e-cars, e-buses, maglev trains, hyperloop, etc. Given the scenario, a paradigm shift is required in the transportation policy. But government is keen on introducing Metro in the cities in India. So a thorough study has to be conducted to assess the need of the Metro. In the city of Lucknow, various jokes related to Metro are shared like – “the only source of income of LMRCL is - “let us go to see Metro today!””. So infrastructure is something which should be need based and not fantasy based.