It was a crisp, winter late-afternoon and I was heading to meet a friend for coffee. I left the guesthouse, where I was staying, and walked to the closest metrobus station. It was a short, 10 minute walk, made all the more pleasant by the waning winter sun casting a gilded hue all over. Since I didn’t have a travel card, I got a token from the self-service ticket vending machine at the station, and walked down to the platform. I looked up at the LED information board – the next bus was arriving in about one minute, followed by another in two minutes. Hmmm. I looked around – the crowd was thin. It was 4pm, probably a little early for the rush hour traffic. A red bus approached, and I walked over to the glass doors. More people queued behind me, a few impatient ones on my side. The bus docked, and its doors opened simultaneously with the glass doors at the platform. Two women, in their late 40s, walked out, as the rest of us walked in. Both doors shut behind us.
Inside, there was a reverent silence – a few whispers, a cough, the humming of the bus’ air conditioning, and the pssst sound every time the bus driver applied the air brakes. It was a pleasant surprise. I got off two stations later, deposited my coin in the turnstiles at the exit, and walked down into the cacophony of Kalma Chowk.
Yes, this trip did not take place in London or LA. It took place in Lahore. And yes, I was as pleasantly shocked back then as you are now, in case you still haven’t taken the Lahore Metrobus.
folly or far-sightedness
the Rs30 billion project has been polarising at best, eliciting more opposition than support; is that fair?
Shahbaz Sharif is a true Lahori, theatrical in his very essence. All his work, therefore, is surrounded by immense drama. He dreams up grand projects, and executes them at lightening speeds. By the time the opponents grasp the idea of his latest fancy and start protesting, the project is up and running. The Lahore Metrobus has been no exception.
Reactions to the Rs30 billion project, like any big-ticket development project, have been polarised at best. Opponents have slammed the project as wasteful, useless, political gimmick, blot on Lahore’s beauty and insensitive to the city’s fabric and heritage. Oft-compared to the Berlin Wall for its ubiquitous iron bars, opponents claim it has divided the city between haves and have-nots, and done little to relieve it of traffic congestion. The Metrobus has also been termed an unjust expenditure, with the 27-km long line costing more than the allocation to any other head (including education, health, water supply, energy, irrigation etc) under the Punjab Annual Development Programme 2012-13, and thrice as much as the allocation to Southern Punjab Development Programme.
Barring self-praise from the provincial government itself, there are few vocal supporters of the project. Most opinion leaders have relegated it to a pre-poll political gimmick, and avoided a dispassionate review that a project of this size and impact deserves. We will therefore place the Lahore Metrobus in its context – urban transportation – and then dissect it to see if it’s a case of political folly, or far-sightedness.
Tyranny of geography
In large, sprawling cities, geography has its tyranny that it unleashes on the most disadvantaged citizens. In developing world cities like Karachi and Lahore, this oppression is amplified several folds. For millions of working class citizens in such cities, jobs and homes are miles apart and access to personal mobility – a motorcycle or car – a distant dream, making distances oppressive, and traversing them a daily ordeal. Amorphous urban sprawl creates two key issues vis-à-vis mobility – congestion and cost. For most working citizens, therefore, a disproportionate part of the day, and a large share of their wage, is spent commuting to and from work. It may be of value to evaluate the present transportation options available to commuters in Pakistan’s two largest cities.
Karachi, to state very generously, has a semblance of a ‘bus network.’ About 18,000 disheveled buses, coaches, wagons and mini-wagons ply hundreds of routes on an arbitrary number and naming scheme. For a city of 18 million, that’s about one bus per 1,000 people, although there is no definite number of passengers using the system daily. There is not a single map, however basic, that charts out any part of the network, and navigating it, therefore, is a job for the seasoned, or the needy. Absolutely no one ‘chooses’ this mode of transportation. Of course, strikes, shut downs, celebrations and official holidays bring the entire network to a screeching halt, leaving those who depend solely on it for transportation, often stranded.
01. Looking north from the pedestrian access bridge at Ittefaq Hospital Station, Lahore. Photo: Gulraiz Khan
Lahore, a city roughly half the population, has never truly bothered with mass transit, until now. According to Lahore Transport Company’s website, there are 650 buses plying 30 functional routes, with plans of inducting 2,000 new buses and realigning the entire route network. That’s roughly one bus for over 3,700 people.
The other motorised public transport alternative – rickshaws and taxis – are increasingly unaffordable, even for the middle class. With CNG shortages and escalating fuel prices, the regular fares for a 10 to 15 kilometre journey are easily in three figures. Most labourers and low-paid workers, therefore, use bicycles, and the bulk of the labour force opts for motorcycles.
The rest, that can afford them, have private cars.
Our cities have been plodding along this precarious equilibrium, however bad, until the spanner of rising fuel prices was thrown in. Now, it is not just the least well off in the cities that are feeling the pinch. The ever-escalating petrol prices have been a great equaliser and have made commuting, even for those with motorcycles or cars, prohibitively expensive.
So, as fuel costs rise, our roads get choked, and without any viable public transportation alternatives, are we headed to a grinding halt? Absolutely. Especially if we still have not started thinking seriously about an efficient, dependable, and respectable mass transit system.
02. Signage at Ittefaq Hospital Station, Lahore. Photo: Gulraiz Khan
Why mass transit?
When millions of people inhabit one geographic area, they will invariably have to move around in large numbers. The conventional wisdom, therefore, goes that as cities approach one million population mark, the city administration needs to invest in a mass transit system – to move a large number of people back and forth. Unfortunately, that conventional wisdom eluded Pakistan’s city managers. They decided to restrict themselves to building roads, and let the private sector handle transportation. They did not realise that Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ does not always work, especially when it comes to merit goods, like public transportation.
After circumscribing their responsibility, they went on to build roads, expressways and flyovers, believing that these will magically resolve congestion and commuter issues. The experience of South East Asian capitals – Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila – was lost on them. The capitals of Asian tigers built expressways upon roads upon expressways throughout the 1990s, only to realise that their cities were choked by the turn of the century. More asphalt induced more demand and in the absence of mass transit networks, it only worsened congestion and air quality. They went back to the drawing board, and drafted new mass transit schemes.
03. Automated Metrobus Card recharge and token dispensing machine at the Ittefaq Hospital Station, Lahore. Photo: Gulraiz Khan
Why not flashy trains?
The phrase mass transit conjures images of modern trains seamlessly transporting hundreds of thousands deep underground, or on elevated tracks. The former Punjab provincial government, under Musharraf’s rule, claims it had a similar vision for Lahore. They have, however, possibly spent more on recent advertising campaign bemoaning the scrapping of their vision by Shahbaz Sharif’s administration in favour of the Lahore Metrobus, than the planned system itself.
And while it would have been absolutely fantastic to have gleaming trains speeding under our cities, there is a small caveat. Rail-based transit systems, evelated or underground, are stratospherically expensive. Subway lines, on average, cost between $100 - $250 million per kilometer, depending on the region, geography and several other factors. The upcoming phase of Dehli Metro, whose first phase was touted as a success story for the developing world, would cost a whopping $163 million per kilometer. Assuming that it would cost $150 million per kilometer, how much would the current 27-kilometre track of the Lahore Metrobus would have cost if it were rail-based? Rs405 billion. That is almost seven times more expensive than the Metrobus, even if one were to assume that it cost twice as much – Rs60 billion, and not Rs30 billion – as claimed by the Punjab government.
So if we want to drastically transform our cities, and do that cheap and fast, what option do we have? Bus Rapid Transit, or the poor man’s subway.
‘Surface subway’
Jamie Lerner, the three times mayor of Cuiritiba, in southern Brazil, came up with the idea of the ‘surface subway’ back in early 1970s, laying the foundation for modern BRT systems. A subway should have speed, reliability, comfort and good frequency. Lerner strived to have all these conditions on surface – hence the term ‘surface subway’ for the world’s first bus systems with dedicated corridors, off-board fare collection and the look and feel of a modern subway. Today, 75% of Cuiritibans get to work by a bus in the morning, and 2.3 million passengers use the BRT system every day. Other South American cities, including Bogota, Lima and Sao Paulo, replicated the BRT, transforming and improving not just the system itself, but also their cities. The previously crime-riddled cities, notorious for their drug cartels and high homicide rates, are now safer, more accessible, and provide a higher quality of life to their residents. A large part of that success is attributed to BRT systems that have transformed not just mobility, but through integrated land-use planning, the relationship of the citizens with their cities.
Since then, BRT systems, like the Lahore Metrobus, have come a long way and are proving to be the choice mode of mass transit in developing economies’ urban centres. Since the year 2000, 14 Chinese cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, have built around 500 kilometres of BRT systems, and made them a key component of their transportation networks. India is following suit, with five operational BRT systems in cities including Delhi, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Pune, 6 under construction and 8
04. Walking down the stairs to the bus bay at the Ittefaq Hospital Station, Lahore. Photo: Gulraiz Khan
BRT systems in planning phase. Jakarta, which, like Karachi, does not have rail-based transit, has been implementing a massive BRT system since 2004 by the name of TransJakarta. As of February 2013, TransJakarta has12 functional corridors, totaling 172 kilometres, served by 520 buses. The system carried about 310,000 passengers per day in 2011.
Pakistan’s debutante
Pakistan, therefore, is a late entrant to the BRT club, with its first BRT line opening up in Lahore in February 2013. Within a few weeks of its inauguration, the single-corridor system that cut through Lahore, was carrying over 140,000 passengers a day.
The corridor, when viewed independently, is extremely well designed, and meets several of the criteria laid out in The BRT Standard, a set of international best practices in BRT systems designed by the New York-based Institute for Transportation and Development Policy.
The Lahore Metrobus has barrier-controlled, automated off-board fare collection, service interval of less than 2 minutes in peak hours, a segregated right-of-way, modern stations bearing well-designed signage, information systems and precision bus docking system synchronized with sliding, automated glass doors that lend the bus stops a look and feel of a modern subway station. The stations also host a basic park and ride facility, with provision for bicycle parking that may appear wasteful at present, but would come in very handy as the system develops.
The system, however, has had its fair share of criticism. While the single corridor may not have rid the city of congestion and transformed the lives of its citizens instantaneously, it most certainly is the first solid brick in the foundation of a modern, efficient, dependable mass transit system. Karachi, despite its sincere efforts, has only been dreaming up one mass transit system after another in the meanwhile.
The metrobus, however, does have its flaws. Most importantly, BRT corridors do not work standalone. They need to be part of a larger transit system, complete with feeder services, and connections to other transit systems. It has also been designed ad hoc, independent of land-use patterns. Environmental feasibilities, a pre-requisite, were completed halfway through the construction, and, I daresay, the unending stretch of iron bars does look ugly. Unfortunately, they are imperative for enforcing the segregated right-of-way, and avoiding accidents involving adventurous citizens crossing the BRT passage. Once we all learn to be law-abiding and civilized citizens, the iron bars could be replaced with low-rise kerb stones.
The Lahore Metrobus, therefore, has to be seen as such – a first experiment that would inform future urban mass transit projects within the country. The project has been expensive, but like all greenfield projects, the system had to be built from scratch. A second line in the system would cost far less, since a fare collection system or station designs etc will not have to be redeveloped. Opponents of the project bemoan high fares, with one way fare, irrespective of distance, increased to Rs40. While that may be high for travelling the distance between two or three stations, an auto-rickshaw, the only other alternative in Lahore in most cases, would cost far more as the distance travelled along the corridor is increased.
05. Synchronised, automated glass doors that open when the bus docks at bay at the Ittefaq Hospital Station, Lahore. Photo: Gulraiz Khan
Building on to the system
A well-designed BRT system also holds the key to resolving one of the key public grievances effectively – fuel prices. Every time the price of petrol rises, there is a huge backlash, particularly from the transporters’ unions who nonetheless pass all of it to commuters. With a BRT system in place, the government could subsidise the fare for bus commuters directly, instead of a blind cash transfer to transporters’ unions, or a blanket subsidy to all petrol consumers.
The technology embedded in a BRT system allows for swift and easy implementation of such policies. Every trip on the Lahore Metrobus is recorded; therefore, for each trip made, the government could
06. Transport Planning Unit's Map of the Lahore Metrobus system, showing the presently functional line in lime green, and two proposed corridors in red.
subsidise part of the fare. This would not only shield the least well off citizens from fuel price hike, and in turn protect the government from popular wrath, but could also be used as an incentive to lure private vehicle users to public transport.
The Lahore Metrobus, therefore, be re-judged in light of its potential. Its cost should be weighed against the existing congestion and opportunity cost incurred in winding traffic jams across the cities, instead of weighing against wishful schools, hospitals and other alternative projects that may never be built. It is the cheapest, and extremely effective, form of mass transit that has been built fast, and to good standard. In a country as hungry for development as Pakistan, there could always be alternative ways of spending every rupee. But some projects are more urgent, and can have a greater multiplier effect, than others. The transformative effect of a better, effective, accessible and modern transportation system should not be hard to imagine.
Better public transport is not wishful thinking, it is a right. Just like large parks and public spaces, mass transit systems allow for democratisation of space and geography. They open the door to mobility, and consequently access to employment, especially for the most disadvantaged. The Lahore Metrobus project, therefore, has to be viewed under the light of this perspective to arrive at a fair assessment of whether it’s an expensive mistake, or a judicious investment in our future.
07. Interior of a bus station on the Lahore Metrobus, complete with automated glass doors well-designed signage and digital information systems. Photo: Gulraiz Khan
an abridged version of this article appeared in the express tribune sunday magazine on april 21, 2013 and can be accessed here.
/ Lahore Metrobus