In Race to Build Metro Trains, How Indian Cities Ignored Larger Mobility Issue

Eight years after this announcement, India's big push on metro trains is indeed apparent.

To put this into perspective - before 2014, the entire metro-rail network in India totaled up to just 229 km that spanned in only four cities: Kolkata, Delhi, Gurgaon, and Bangalore. Ten years later, by 2024, the metro-rail operates in a network of over 900 km, spread in 13 major cities (this figure crosses 20 cities if we count their adjoining satellite cities) across the country. Before 2014, the average of monthly metro lines started was 0.68 km. This increased to 5.6 km per month in April 2023.

Another 1,000 km of metro track is either under-construction or approved or proposed in more than two dozen cities.

The quick turnaround of these big projects seem commendable. But the ridership numbers of these metro networks paint a grim picture.

Despite being comfortable and eco-friendly, the failure of suburban metro trains to attract riders stems from a simple fact – most urban Indians do not need metros.

"Metro essentially fails where trip distances are small, which is much of India," said Shreya Gadepalli, an urban mobility expert involved in the transport planning of several Indian cities. "Most cities in India tend to expand radially and the trips are distributed, which means people are typically trying to find their vocation closer to their house. And that's why many of the trips are short. In this context, metro doesn't work."

"Indian cities have high densities. So we don't expect too many people doing long trips. I think it is unrealistic to expect that a lot of people will use metros," said Geetam Tiwari, chair professor at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi's Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Center.

"Metro-like systems are very attractive for long-distance travel, which is more than 10-15 kilometers. Even in cities like Lucknow, Jaipur, Kochi, etc, data indicates that not more than six-seven percent people are traveling long distances. So it is not a surprise that the ridership on metro systems are low in our cities," Tiwari added.

"So even if a city expands its metro network, it won't be useful to more people because only a few bigger cities have long trips in the range of 10-15%, rest all other cities have less than 10% long trips. That's why, the expansion of metro coverage won't see a big spike in riders," added Tiwari.

"Some of the metro corridors in Delhi are doing very very well, but that doesn't mean that on the whole metro is actually delivering on the initial promise on which it was made. Compare this to some of the other cities, even larger ones like Chennai, the demand has been somewhere between one-fourth to one-eight of the initial projected demand," said Gadepalli.

In the eight year period between 2014-2022, the Government of India released Rs. 90,000 crore of funds for metro rail projects.

"Every state wants to have metro trains in every small cities because that's this whole attraction of this new technology," said Tiwari.

"Now we have cities in India which have built a metro but the bus service is more or less non-existent," said Gadepalli, who was involved in the planning of India's first Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) in Ahmedabad.

"Now we have many two million-sized cities which have actually built a metro. In these cities, let's look at the stats: a kilometer of metro would cost over 500 crore rupees. Sometimes even more, especially, if you're trying to build underground. This one kilometer, if you look at Indian stats, in a best-case scenario like Delhi or Mumbai, it would serve somewhere between 10,000-20,000 passengers in a day per kilometer. So essentially, if you build 10 kms, it will serve somewhere between 1-2 lakh people. The same 500 crores are sufficient to operate 500 top-quality metro-like buses that can meet the need, which will reach a large part of the city and these buses can serve between 4-5 lakh people," added Gadepalli. "So essentially, in place of building four kilometers of metro, you can serve the entire population of the city with high quality bus services."

"If we want to give quality public transport to all citizens, we should have a very good bus system integrated with only one or two lines with Metro," added Tiwari.

"In a few corridors in some of the larger cities, metros make complete sense. And I think we should completely focus on that, but smaller demand corridors in large cities and most of the smaller cities metro doesn't make any sense there. That's where we need better buses," said Gadepalli.

Shivanand Swamy, Director Emeritus at CEPT University's Centre of Excellence in Urban Transport, said, "the logical sequence would be to build public transport ridership via bus-based system and then introduce a metro. But if you directly start from a high-cost investment like metro, then you are forced to develop feeder buses later for the first-mile and last-mile connectivity."

He added, "wherever we have metro systems developed, they are not integrated. Therefore, when you build a 60 km long to metro, it essentially covers 60 sq km. The city may be 500-1,000 sq km."

What happens if you build a metro train network without developing a bus network?

"Only depending on metro will not solve our problem. Because after introducing metro in Bangalore, the numbers of buses were not increased, now the bus ridership has gone down, metro ridership never increased, and what is happened then? There are many more two-wheelers on the road. More people are traveling by two-wheelers," said Tiwari.

"If you select metros as a mode and develop it, then it is not going to solve our mobility problem. Public transport should be developed from a systems perspective rather than a mode perspective," added Swamy. "Therefore, I think we need to integrate metros and buses, and develop them as one system right up front rather than develop them one after another. Covering the entire city would mean that we need to have physical integration, fair integration, and also the institutional integration, so that people access the whole system smoothly without any obstruction."

"In 1980s, probably we had a very good public transport system," said Swamy. "Like BEST in Mumbai, Pallavans in Chennai. BMTC in Bangalore. Ahmedabad had MTS."

"If you were to look at the time till even the early 90s, many Indian cities, which presently do not have public transport, used to have good public transport," said Gadepalli.

The economic flourishment post the 1991-liberalisation enabled crores of Indian households to buy a personal motor vehicle.

The widespread access to private vehicle meant that public transport has to match the comfort, reliability, flexibility, and economy of a private vehicle.

"You need to know that public transport is actually competing with autos and two-wheelers," added Swamy.

"There is a 5-5-5 rule. The public transport should be within five minutes of reach, it should arrive within five minutes of delay, and it gets to the destination without a delay of more than five minutes. That's what everybody wants – on-time and in-comfort seamless commute i.e. without being herded like a cow and without blowing a hole in the pocket," said Gadepalli. "Just because my city has a metro rail, which is 10 km away from my home, it doesn't do anything for me."

"In the Indian context, public transport fare should be half of whatever it costs to go on a two-wheeler," added Gadepalli. "If it costs the same as a two-wheeler, most people are going to go on a two-wheeler."

"And two-wheeler ownership in India is very high. Almost 60% of the households in urban areas own two-wheeler. Two-wheeler is very reliable because it is at your doorstep. It doesn't really get stuck in congestion. You can always weave through the traffic. So two-wheeler usage, therefore, we find very high and if we want to wean away people from two-wheelers to public transport, it has to meet the reliability, comfort, convenience, and economy of a two-wheeler," added Tiwari.

It's not that there has been no initiative to introduce quality bus services in Indian cities. In 2009, Ahmedabad came up with India's first Bus Rapid Transit System, popularly known as BRTS. These BRTS buses swiftly move around the city in their exclusive lanes on the roads. Gadepalli and Swamy, both, were involved in the planning of Ahmedabad's BRTS. 

"In addition to Ahmedabad, there were actually nearly 10 other cities, which also thought about BRT, but unfortunately most of them did not do very well on implementing BRT," said Gadepalli.

"The problem has been that people assume that by introducing bus system, car travel will become easier. You introduce a bus system so that commute becomes easier for people who travel by buses. Bus system is not there to promote cars. And that's what happened in Delhi's BRTS. Because the car lanes were getting congested and the buses were moving freely, that caused a lot of hue and cry," added Tiwari. "If car drivers start facing congestion, they start blaming the bus lane for that."

Many cities, which ambitiously started BRTS, had to shut it down because it was causing congestion for cars. And this highlights one of the biggest flaws of India's urban transportation policy – in which cars take precedence over buses. 

"Even though, in reality, public transport users are larger in number, development is seen as being equated to car," added Gadepalli.

"The transport policy has become car-centric mainly because the people who move around in the car are the decision-makers in many ways, and people who do not use cars, their voices are never heard," said Swamy, who has worked on transport planning with several local, state and national governments.

Urban transport planning is a step-by-step process and each city starts from a different point of infrastructure, size, population, etc. What applies to Mumbai may not be applicable in Bengaluru. A BRTS could work in an Ahmedabad but it couldn’t in a Bhopal or a Pune.

Bottomline is – traffic jams cannot be the norm and our cities shouldn’t function with a fractured public transport. The needs of our expanding cities can’t be fulfilled just by focusing on metros and private vehicles.

Swamy added, "private vehicles in our cities can never be a solution. We only have less than a meter per person road space. Therefore, we will reach a time when we will not have anything but to depend on public transport, but when you reach there, at that point in time, solutions are going to be much costlier. It's not going to be easy doing all of that."