7/31/2019 Business Stadard Commuter Rail for Bangalore20120722a_011101003

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INDULEKHAARAVIND

Namma Metro is widelypraised, never mind thatits current reach is only

6 km and that it will be yearsbefore it makes a dent in the cityslegendary traffic jams.

Every once in a while, otherways to ease that congestion aresought, from monorail to high-speed rail to flyovers. One sugges-tion doing the rounds is commuterrail a system which may yetmove off the drawing board.Infrastructure consultancy RITESwill submit a draft report on com-muter rail to the government nextmonth, and a committee of stake-holders will begin deliberations.

This system would use short-

distance passenger trains runningon existing railway tracks to con-nect Bangalore with distant sub-urbs, as Mumbais suburban trainsdo in that city. The idea is toexploit tracks that are not beingused to full potential. Commuter

rail has the potential to transportpeople living 60-100 km away tothe city in one and a half hours.Thats the same time you wouldspend commuting to ElectronicsCity by car if you lived in the city,says Sanjeev V Dyamannavar, amember of advocacy group Praja.

The group submitted a call toaction report on commuter railto the government in July 2010,and has suggested six routes cov-ering 375 km, with 24 trains perday per route. The six growth cen-tres Praja identified are Hosur,Ramanagara, Tumkur, Chikballa-pur, Dodballapur and Bangarpet,all within 100 km of the city. TheRITES report identifies 10 routes,covering 405 km, which couldtransport 2 million people a day.

Dyamannavar says the systemoffers multiple advantages, apartfrom the obvious one of easingtraffic. If people staying in thesuburbs can travel easily to thecity, they will naturally prefer tolive there, which will also reduce

housing pressure on the city. Thecommuter rail system even avoidslarge-scale land acquisition, as itwould use either existing infra-structure or Railways land. Thismeans that it can be implementedwithin a year of the report beingaccepted and approved by the gov-ernment and Railway Board, hesays. There is no deadline for thereport to be accepted.

RITESs report says the cityspublic transport commutingneeds are met mostly byBangalore Metropolitan TransportCorporation (BMTC) buses, whichhave a daily ridership of 4.5 mil-lion. But the report points out thattraffic congestion limits theexpansion of bus services, whilethe metro and proposed monorail

are confined to city limits.The investment commuter railrequires is also limited. Phase 1 ofNamma Metro is estimated at~12,000 crore for 42.3 km, servingpossibly 1 million passengers aday. RITES estimates the total cost

of implementing two phases of thecommuter rail system, with acapacity of more than 2.5 milliontrips a day, to be ~8,346 crore.Commuter rail would also be use-ful to people with lowerincome, as its ticketswould be much cheaper,says T G Sitharam, chair-man of the Centre forInfrastructure, SustainableTransportation and UrbanPlanning at the IndianInstitute of Science.

Previous reportslooked only at track avail-ability, says Sudhanshu Mani, divi-sional regional manager of South

Western Railway, and seem tohave been drawn up withoutdomain knowledge. But theRITES report, he says, is inchingtowards acceptance by the

Railway Board and theCabinet.

Nevertheless, imple-mentation will requirethat new stations bebuilt so that stops are nofurther than 2 km apart,that existing stations beupgraded, that the

entire signalling systembe automated and thatnew railway rakes be procured.

For all its merits, commuter railis no panacea for traffic problems,

warns Ramesh Ramanathan,social entrepreneur and co-founder of non-profitJanaagraha. The system isvery sound in principle butimplementing it will requiretremendous inter-agencycoordination which, whilenot impossible, has proven

to be very difficult in India.There is very little coordina-tion, he points out, evenbetween the regional rail-way boards and state gov-ernments. What we needis a blueprint for an inte-grated multimodal trans-port system, prepared by atechnically competentgroup, which addressesall the aspects of sucha system from opera-tional details to financial

implications. And ofcourse there is that oneingredient critical forthe implementation ofany public project political will.

If people inthe suburbscan traveleasily to thecity, pressureon housingwill reduce

SOUTH

Faster, fartherA proposed new commuter rail system could bring people to the cityfrom distant suburbs cheaply and efficiently. Will it happen?

Mumbais suburban trains (above) are a model that Bangalore could follow;

a government poster (below right) juxtaposes the citys famously bad traffic

(below left) with a fast and unobstructed train system

BANGALOREREUTERS

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