Delhi govt's insane idea to curb pollution

At Rs 140 crore per km, an elevated corridor will cost about the same as Delhi Metro’s Rs 160 crore, says Subir Roy.

Delhi’s one-year-old Aam Aadmi Party government can be credited with one good idea and one which borders on the insane.

The good idea is the odd-even scheme for cars (odd and even numbered cars allowed on alternate days) which worked, bringing down pollution appreciably and traffic congestion significantly.  

The scheme was carefully worked out with sensible exceptions and the launch helped by volunteers.

It had precisely the kind of public participation and police buy-in which the ill-fated and now discontinued bus rapid transit (BRT) system did not.

The success of the trial has prompted the government to indicate it will relaunch the scheme in a month or two. 

The horrendous idea is to announce, while burying the BRT experiment, that it will be replaced with a double decker elevated corridor - one for buses and one for cars.

There are at least three reasons working against it. First, the huge cost.

At Rs 140 crore per km, it will cost about the same as Delhi Metro’s Rs 160 crore. Compared to this, BRT cost around Rs 10 crore per km.

Second, emission/pollution per passenger ride will be significantly higher for the elevated corridor than for metro rail. Delhi will thereby retain its place at the head of the global league table of polluted cities.  

Third, the elevated corridor, instead of discouraging car use and ownership, will actually encourage it.

If you have the money - in Delhi a lot of people do - you will be able to both buy a car and pay the toll charge to use the elevated corridor.

The trade-off will then be between a nice car ride for a small minority and the enormous cost to public health which will become more and more glaring over time.

And we are not even counting the ugliness that results from a concrete monstrosity slicing a road or area into two. 

One reason why the odd-even experiment succeeded was it did not create unbearable hardship for the public.

This was partly ensured by the administration being able to put on the road a number of additional buses.

Perhaps the wisest decision announced is that by the year-end the city will have 3,000 more buses.

If this can be done along with making bus services frequent and - most important - predictable, then it will be a winner.  

An absolute must to ensure predictability in bus services is to bring all buses under a GPS (global positioning system) enabled monitoring system.

This will allow a control room to track the movement of all buses - whether they are actually plying and if so sticking to the route and allotted timing.

The tracking will allow a stick-and-carrot system to be followed, particularly useful when privately owned and operated buses are inducted into the system under contract.  

The GPS system will also yield enormous amount of traffic data and a pattern for traffic jams.

It will be possible then to reroute buses around traffic jams so that you don’t have to be stationary in a bus caught in a jam.    

This is not a fanciful new idea unworkable in a country where government transport departments are not information technology savvy.

Indore has had a GPS enabled and monitored city bus service for a decade now. More important, the Uber and Ola taxi services run on GPS and smartphones.  

The most important point in favour of buses is that they are so cost effective.

A modern, low floor air-conditioned bus for city travel costs under Rs 1 crore. So you can get all the 3,000 new buses in under Rs 3,000 crore.

Thus in one go, it will take the total number of buses operating in Delhi from 6,000 to 9,000.

This will still be short of the required 11,000 but much closer than today’s situation.

For the same investment you will get just 20 km of elevated BRT-car system (Delhi metro is now 213 km), whereas the 3,000 buses will be able to crisscross the entire national capital.   

So far an enormous amount of money has been spent in building token little stretches of metro rail in many Indian cities without trying to do a cost benefit analysis of alternative modes of transport.

The big issues with buses is pollution and so the aim must be to go forward first with running all of them on CNG and then have electric buses.

This will change the cost structure but over time as technology progresses, the cost of electric buses or the distance they can cover in one charge will improve. 

What happens in Delhi is important to the whole country because Delhi is facing problems which will affect other cities over time as their incomes, number of cars and level of pollution increase in tandem. Crack these issues for Delhi and you will have a template to devise specific solutions for other cities, given their special characteristics.

Roads in Bengaluru are, for example, far narrower than in Delhi. Population density and ridership demand in Kolkata, for example, is higher than in most other cities.  

The slogan to remember, in the manner of the thought control brigade in Aldous Huxley’s 1930s novel Brave New World, is “Buses good, Cars bad, Buses good..."