Transport for London (TfL), the integrated transport authority that is responsible for meeting London’s transportation needs, is working with India’s Ministry of Road Transport and Highways on a programme to invest in public transport buses.
“It is important to recognise that even in systems that are dominated by rail transport, buses have an important role to play. In India, the lack of buses is acute,” says Shashi Verma, Director of Strategy & Chief Technology Officer, TfL.
In a recent interaction with
The programme, to be led by the Centre, would have participation from the States that could demonstrate their willingness to reform bus services to make them competitive. The idea was that the Centre would provide some funding to kickstart the process and provide ongoing support, while the States would also put money. “We can involve the private sector in this process if the State governments are willing. It is not essential, but there is an advantage to involving the private sector because it brings in more efficiency,” Verma said.
If this programme was implemented, the number of buses in India would more than double. Cities such as London have an extensive rail network. There was more Metro in London alone than in all of India. And, despite that, there were more bus journeys in London than there were tube journeys – there were seven million bus journeys every day against 4.5 million tube journeys. Bus journeys were one-and-a-half times higher than tube journeys. This ratio would be the same in other major cities that had extensive rail networks as well. “In any future that we imagine, we have to recognise the centrality of the bus network,” Verma said.
‘They keep the city moving’
India had only 10 per cent of the buses that it needs. One of the reasons for this, he said, was that unlike metro rail systems or highways, which were capital investment proposals, buses required a service model to be developed. It required a different sort of approach.
To a question, Verma said nowhere in the world public transport bus systems made a profit. Fares on buses were kept low for a variety of valid political and social reasons. Political reasons were sometimes considered pejorative, but in reality, buses provided the ultimate essential transport for people who did not have any other means of transport. It was important to recognise that a social purpose was being fulfilled by buses and it was the thing that kept a city moving.
The low fares would result in a viability gap, which governments had to find mechanisms to fill, through grants, subsidy and support. In India, the viability gap had not been fixed, which was why bus services were poor. In many cases, bus companies were given loans that had to be repaid. With their bloated balance sheets, bus companies were hardly in a position to repay the loans. There was a need to recognise that these loans were not going to be repaid, that this was not a financing issue and that it was a grant issue, and that the government had to provide the grants. It had to be budgetary support for running the buses, he said.
Clarity of purpose
Public transport was not an end in itself; it had a clear purpose and you had to be clear about what that purpose was, said Verma. For instance, the principle role of TfL was to support the economic competitiveness of London. Therefore, for a city such as Chennai, the leading businesses should come together and decide what needed to be done to make the city competitive. The ability to attract high quality global businesses to locate themselves in a city was contingent upon the quality of life that the city was able to offer. This had many parameters to it, but how the land got used to provide good quality spaces and the transport networks to connect homes to offices were important. Transport planning and land use planning had to be integrated and not done in isolation.
Would a congestion charge as was in vogue in London apply to an Indian city? Verma said the congestion charge was one of the many instruments that were used to control traffic in London. There was a role for a congestion charge in every city in India, or for that matter in any city in the world. But before getting to such sophisticated policies, it was important to first look at parking, which was visibly wrong. There was no free housing for anyone in India, but there was free parking for cars, he said. This was clearly not the right policy.
Verma said TfL was assisting the World Bank on a project with the Tamil Nadu Government which was looking at how cities could be improved further. The State Government had been in discussions with the World Bank for quite sometime about a city partnership, across multiple departments, including transport, urban planning and water. If the World Bank and the Tamil Nadu Government were able to strike a deal, this would be first time that the bank would do a city partnership, Verma said.