Getting Safety Back On Rails

Mumbai has long been praised for its resilience as the city that rewards enterprise and its chaos romanticised in films, but it took the Mumbra outrage to turn the spotlight on its hidden toll of nearly 10 people dying on its suburban railway system every day. The four people who fatally fell from a local train like rag dolls became the faces of a chronic malaise. Even with a fresh emphasis on safety, there can be no revolutionary change to the quality of suburban train travel in the short term. Yet the world’s busiest urban train system can be de-stressed by quickly addressing the easier pieces of the puzzle. To start with, there is a tremendous mismatch between demand and supply; a study published by the National Medical Journal of India five years ago said train services increased by 282% over five decades, but passengers carried rose by 792%. The resulting crush and the disorderly conditions along the tracks lead to the accidental death of about 3,600 people in a year. Among the injured, 46%, the majority of them in the productive 14-45-year age group, suffer serious trauma. As the Bombay High Court has suggested, introducing automatic doors may be one way to prevent passengers from falling onto the tracks, although that would still not address the issue of those who are struck by trains while crossing. Relieving some of the pressure on the railway system, which remains the cheapest mode of travel, calls for imagination and political will. Quite simply, raising the quality of bus travel and adopting a subsidised fare structure that approximates train travel can shift some riders away from the suburban system.

Mumbai Local Train Update: Overhead Wire Snaps Between Kurla-Sion, UP Fast Line Hit; Trains Diverted, Services Disrupted

The Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport (BEST) Undertaking has hit the right note with a plan to introduce air-conditioned buses on many routes, while the proposal for a fully electric fleet of 8,000 buses by 2027 is promising. But as transport experts point out, fares for comfortable bus travel cannot exceed the per-kilometre cost of a two-wheeler. Sadly, Mumbai’s Metro rail efforts have crawled along, making the bus the only feasible mode to augment short-haul travel. Fair fares on both modes can be the magic sauce. What is more, favouring cars over buses on newly built expressway infrastructure sends out the wrong message. Water transport, a promising addition to the mix during the good seasons, has also had a slow start; the plan to replicate Kochi’s successful Water Metro and integrate tickets to other modes needs urgent support. All this has to be achieved without making public transport users look like freeloaders, which they are not. In fact, car users can be charged a congestion fee, as in Singapore, London, Stockholm and New York, using the revenue to make metro, bus and ferry travel more attractive.