An amusement park called Mumbai
Rajendra Aklekar | Thursday, November 3, 2011
Old timers will remember that Mumbai once had trams.
They were shut down as they were old, slow and considered to be a problem in congested roads. Of single and double decks, they were an additional mode of public transit to the BEST bus network. The last tram ran in 1964. For the next 40 years, the city grew, so did its population but the public transport systems remained static.
Half-hearted efforts were made to match the burgeoning population. Studies and suggestions were mooted, but they remained only on paper. A new mode of micro-mini public transport — the autorickshaw — did get introduced, but it didn’t help much in mass transit.
Crowds kept growing and reached saturation. Realisation dawned. The reports begun to take life and authorities woke up to implement the recommendations.
A Metro was planned, but when authorities realised it would take time, a Monorail was planned as a quick-fix solution. To decongest local trains, the railway ministry planned an elevated railway.
With the high-speed train craze, Mumbai was also included in the national hi-speed rail plan and work is under process.
To cater to seamless freight movement, the dedicated freight corridor corporation has begun plans and started acquiring land for their own network of double-deck freight trains to link Mumbai and its ports to their network. The BEST has plans for a dedicated corridor and fleet cabs and autos are another addition.
The thing is, all this will be an overdose. What Mumbai will have in the next 20 years is six to seven different modes of transport crammed in 437 sq km — a hotchpotch of everything with no coordination and inter-connectivity. It will be like an amusement park offering all kinds of short rides or a transport museum — from the continent’s oldest railway (the existing suburban railway) to the highly advanced monorail to an elevated rail corridor to a hi-speed corridor and double deck freight lines.
The government should have instead put its foot down and developed one viable mode of transport with multiple, small corridors.
Just give a thought to this. Every mode of transport will have different requirements of maintenance and repair, different types of yards and lines and multiple experts.
If it was lack of transport planning for the last 40 years, it seems we have suddenly gone in an overdrive. It is, I guess, time to step back and take a macro-level view of things.
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