Travel pressures: Commuters bear the cost of inadequate public transport

One of the striking facts in the latest Household Consumption Expenditure Survey data is that conveyance expenses accounted for the highest share in average monthly expenditures among non-food items. At national level, the share of average monthly per capita consumption expenditures by a household on commuting in rural areas stood at 7.6 per cent and 8.5 per cent in urban areas. At one level, these statistics point to the inevitable trend of rising mobility and the urban sprawl that enable people to commute longer distances from increasingly “rurban” or suburban areas for work. 

Though the rising cost of fuel would have undoubtedly accounted for part of the cost burden, inadequate public-transport infrastructure has also imposed costs on households. The result is that commuters are forced to rely on suboptimal but expensive private solutions to get to work. For the more affluent, the increasing reliance on private cars is creating regular traffic and pollution nightmares in cities — the National Capital Region (NCR) and rapidly expanding IT (information technology) hub of Bengaluru offer particularly grim examples of poor urban transportation planning. The problem is greater in rural areas, where public transport is all but absent. In many such areas, for example, personnel transportation accounts for 50 per cent of a tractor’s usage. Investment in swift, efficient, safe, and cost-effective public transport is becoming all the more critical in India if enterprises are to attract blue- and white-collar workers and, no less importantly, encourage more women to enter the workplace. For instance, the older cities of Mumbai and Kolkata, with their extensive local trains, have significantly enlarged the catchment area for factory and domestic workers. 

In Mumbai, unlike Kolkata, local trains are accessed by the well-heeled executives as well as the factory worker. The partly operational Delhi-Meerut Regional Rapid Transit System (RRTS) is already demonstrating the benefits of better inter-city connectivity. Yet only eight RRTS corridors have been identified, with most of them offering connectivity around the NCR. Bus connectivity, too, can have a transformational impact on urban mobility but is somehow given short shrift in urban transport planning. India has only 2.1 million buses, public and private, to service a national commuter population of more than 140 million, though a quarter of that number tend to commute on foot. State transport undertakings, which tend to offer subsidised fares that poorer commuters can afford, own a small proportion of these buses. Delhi’s disastrously planned experiment with bus rapid transit (BRT) systems acted as a damper for this highly effective mass-mobility solution. Today, only 10 cities have BRTs and another seven propose to introduce them. 

As of now, it is the capital-intensive, time-consuming and traffic-disrupting metro projects that appear to have attracted most urban transport planners. India has operational metro systems in 17 cities. But this relatively glamorous (and admittedly most comfortable) mass transit option has its limitations in terms of coverage. It took the legendary London Underground, for instance, 162 years to become the sprawling network of today. Fares, too, ranging between ₹8 and ₹50, depending on the distance travelled, tend to exclude a large number of people. Unless urban-transport planning is reoriented towards cost-effective solutions, it is a fair bet that Indian households will continue to spend a large part of their earnings just to get to work.