Will you give up your car and take the metro to work?

 

HONG KONG: In the garage of Sunil Joshi’s home in Tsing Yi, a neighbourhood in Hong Kong, is parked a stately sedan. Yet, for his daily commute to and from his office in a glass tower in the financial district of Central, he takes the MTR, Hong Kong’s famed metro railway system that streaks beneath this world city at top speed, bearing 2.4 million passengers every day.

 

“The car is for family outings,” says Joshi. “Only a sense of vanity could compel me to drive to work and pay exorbitant parking charges when there’s the MTR, which is among the most efficient, the most comfortable and the cheapest urban transport systems in the world.”

 

As Mumbai gets going on an ambitious Metro project, a critical determinant of its eventual success in decongesting the metropolis’ roads will be its ability to induce users of private transport - like Joshi in Hong Kong - to get out of their cars and migrate to the Metro, says an urban transportation policy expert who has studied 15 metro systems around the world.

 

Dr Priyanka Jain, Instructor in the Public and Social Administration Department at the City University of Hong Kong, emphasises that Mumbai’s Metro should, in fact, be targeted not at people who are already using public transport facilities, but at “people like us”, who drive to work and back in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

 

And drawing from her study of metro systems around the world - from Tokyo to Santiago - Jain recommends that such a middle-class migration to the Metro can be encouraged through a system of “area licensing” that efficient metropolitan administrations in some world cities have implemented.

 

“The central business district, which is typically the most congested area with the most number of office complexes, could be cordoned off, and anyone entering the area in a private vehicle must pay a toll.”

 

Additionally, as in Hong Kong, a “fuel tax” could serve as a disincentive to use private vehicles, she adds. These could prove politically unpopular, concedes Jain, but they are the building blocks for delivering efficient mass transit systems as in Tokyo, Hong Kong or Singapore.

 

Another critical factor that will impact the Mumbai Metro’s efficiency is the extent to which existing public transport facilities — like the suburban electric train system and the bus services — are integrated with the Metro. “Rather than compete, the planning should be done in such a way that they integrate: the suburban railways feed passengers to the metro system, which carries them within the Mumbai core area.”

 

Equally important, she says, is for the project planning to provide for expanded service operations in the future. She reckons that having a train service with just 4-6 cars and a headway of 4-6 minutes, as envisaged in the Mumbai Metro, will be grossly insufficient for a city with a 20 million population. Indicatively, in Hong Kong, which has a population of just 7 million, the MTR runs 12-car services with a headway of 60-90 seconds.

 

“Unless you plan for these now - in terms of platform length and signalling systems - the system will not be scaleable,” notes Jain.

 

Emphasising the importance of ensuring that the Metro remain self-financing and self-sustaining - without governmental subsidy - Jain suggests a course of action that has proved eminently success in other cities: the vertical separation of development. “This is an arrangement where the government provides the basic infrastructure: the railway stations, platforms, tracks, signalling… the works. But the operation is then privatised; a company can get in its own rolling stock - like train cars - and its own staff and operate it on day-to-day basis.” Under such an arrangement, the government can recover its costs by reaping the benefit of increased property values along the railway lines. And the firm that’s operating the rail system can recover its costs from the fares, without its being subsidised by the government.

 

In Hong Kong, the system works a little differently: the MTR Corporation uses its own finances to develop the railways, including construction of the system, and to operate it. But the government gives the corporation premium land, where it can build houses and shopping complexes in and around the station concourse, and collect a rent. In fact, the MTR’s profits on its property holdings are substantially higher than on its railway operations.

 

The bottomline, according to Jain, is that the Metro should be run like a business, with an eye on profits from efficiency of operations. Only that, she says, will get the Metro on the right track.