Will Metro Solve Bengaluru’s Traffic Problem

(BMRCL) The Bangalore Metropolitan Rail Crop Ltd, which turns NammaMetro is considering increasing the consistency of its duty from every eight minutes to every six minutes on the 18-km Long Purple Line (from Byappanahalli to Mysore Road), apprehend calls to accommodate more travellers during peak hours.

The higher consistency will help upsurge the number of travellers taking the metro to around 150,000 per 24 hour. To put that in plan, that is only 1.5% of the over 10 million population of the city, raising query whether it can ease the traffic situation.

The managing director Pradeep Singh Kharola of BMRCL said that at the end of Phase II, which will take the total length to 62 km, the metro will be able to join 10-15% of the city. But Phase II is not expected to be completed any time before 2019.

And by the time Phase II is work ready, the city would have added another 1.5 million people, saidAshwin Mahesh expert of urban infrastructure. He and the other urban infrastructure experts say the metro is a very large grant to gratify to a small fragment of the total population. The low reach is due to lack of decent route developing and limited connectivity. Also, the high price of development of the plan will always weigh in the metro, the experts said.

While Kharola said that metro will be planned to make it the backbone of the travellers transport system, with city BEST supporting it, the certainty is that BEST in Bengaluru transport over four million people every day or 40% of the city’s population.

Metro does not fit into the programme of things, said V. Ravichandar, member of (BATF) Bangalore Agenda Task Force and urban infrastructure consultant while referring to the lack of investment into improving best services and road connectivity.

The coast of Phase I of the metro which started over a decade ago, had to be revised from Rs 8,158 crore to Rs 13,845 crore due to setback. About 55% of the Phase II coast will be funded by the State and Central governments and the remaining will be embossed through borrowing. When completed, Phases I and II would have cost a huge Rs 40,000 crore, which explains why other mediums of public transport have been overlooked.

Metro plans are also block the commuter rail service. SanjeevDyamnavar of Praja RAAG, an promulgation group for local issues, said over 400km of track lying hollow around the city but the government is not serious about commuter rail, which has the ability to carry over 5,000 people as against metro’s capacity of under 1,000  which is only three coaches.

Commuter rail will cost Rs 10 crore per km, while the metro coasts at east Rs 400 crore per km, he added.

Currently, the metro gives a miss to high-density regions like Koramangala, HSR Layout, BTM Layout, Yelahanka, Kengeri and Whitefield, among other regions where population has grown in recent span.

For example, The Outer Ring Road, a 60-km circle through the place, has most work spaces and large housing regions along it, but is not connected by the metro. R.K.Mishra co-founder- director of the Centre for Smart Cities, a frame to help design and manage smart cities, said that companies with work space along the Outer Ring Road are losing about 2-3 hours of productivity due to traffic issues which is likely to impact the city’s claim to being business destination.

BMRCL is trying to salvage its lack of adequate planning by building extensions on existing lines. To be sure, Bengaluru has expanded by 500 sq.km, from 300 sq. km in 2007 to 800 sq.km now, but the expansion is largely unplanned

According to Bengaluru’s commissioner for transport and road safety Rome Gowada adds, there are over 6 million vehicles in the city and their density is growing by 9% per 12 month. While 5000,000 new vehicles were registered in 2014-15, around 1,400 new vehicles are added in each 24 hour, he said.

Though Mishra believes the metro is only solution to the traffic problem; he has proposed option like Metrino Tax Pods, capsules which carry people on dedicated lines, on these stretches to complement the metro in many regions.

But metro has already become a very large commitment, one that the state government may not be able to ignore. Experts forecast that by 2025, metro will be a $10 billion investment and all other infrastructure will have to support this system. As Ravichandar puts it, “You have built a beast and you will have to keep feeding it.”