Rapid urbanization in India is bringing more vehicles on the roads in cities, but these vehicles are not moving enough people and are only adding to traffic congestion. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs estimates that by 2050, half of the country’s population will be living in cities. If the roads are not decongested, these cities will become unsustainable and unlivable. Improving the urban transport system with provision for adequate public transport is one of the key solutions to decongesting cities. To effectively reduce the number of personal vehicles, such a public transportation system must provide last-mile connectivity. The mere introduction of more city buses, metro rail systems, or mass rapid transit systems cannot provide a sustainable solution to the problem of traffic congestion if such transport systems do not reach every nook and corner of the city. The report of the High Powered Committee Decongesting Traffic in Delhi pointed out that in 2016, public transport (bus and metro) carried more than one crore people daily in the national capital, while cars carried just about 20 lakh. “Yet, a lot of public funding is currently directed towards car-oriented infrastructure, like road widening, flyovers, foot-over-bridges, and underpasses,” it added, which provokes residents in other cities like Guwahati to be worried about the sustainability of flyovers in decongesting the city without adequate public transport. The National Urban Transport Policy, 2006, attributed the primary reason behind most public transport systems in the country becoming financially unsustainable to keeping the fares low on the premise that they are used by poor city commuters who do not have any other means of meeting their travel needs. The policy notes that this has resulted in most public transport systems being unable to recover their operating costs. “In the present day context, however, public transport serves another social purpose. It helps reduce congestion and air pollution if users of personal vehicles can be persuaded to shift to public transport. Their needs are, however, for improved quality and not so much for low fares. It is, therefore, necessary to think of different types of public transport services for different segments of commuters,” it adds. This new premise prompted the Central Government to articulate the provision of different levels of services: a basic service with subsidized fares and a premium service, which is of high quality but charges higher fares and involves no subsidy. The national policy also puts the spotlight on problems arising out of irrational road space allocation, which continues to grip cities like Guwahati. Road space gets allocated to whichever vehicle occupies it first, which implies that the focus of city transport is, therefore, the vehicle and not people. The result, as the policy points out, is that a bus carrying 40 people is allocated only two and a half times the road space that is allocated to a car carrying only one or two people. In this process, the lower income groups have effectively ended up paying, in terms of higher travel time and higher travel costs, for the disproportionate space allocated to personal vehicles. Users of non-motorised modes have tended to be squeezed off the roads on account of serious threats to their safety. The policy emphasises that if the focus of the principles of road space allocation were to be people, then much more space would need to be allocated to public transport systems than is allocated at present. Allocation of one dedicated road lane for public transport vehicles, segregating it from personal cars and other personal mobility solutions, can be expected to rationalise road space allocation and facilitate faster and smoother movement of city buses and other public transport, but it requires comprehensive planning, designing, and land use to improve road engineering and work out an efficient road layout for urban transport to decongest the lanes. The Central Government announced a new scheme in the Union Budget for the 2021–22 scheme with a total outlay of Rs 18,000 crore to support the augmentation of public bus services and facilitate the deployment of innovative public–private partnership models to enable private sector players to finance, acquire, operate, and maintain over 20,000 buses, but the scheme has yet to be implemented. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on MoHUA, however, insists the Urban Transport Planning and Capacity Building Scheme can immensely contribute to the preparation of a comprehensive mobility plan and integrated urban transport planning leading to efficient, comfortable, and fast mobility in urban areas in cities grappling with congestion and traffic-related issues, and this can have “a multiplier effect on productivity, sustainability, and livability of our cities. Even if all the vehicles in a city that run on fossil fuels get replaced with decarbonised vehicles running on green fuels or electricity, it is not going to make the transport system sustainable unless roads are decongested by strengthening public transport.
Course Purchase Query 