AN efficient and developed public transport system in a country not only ensures easy mobility of its people but also offers them wider choice in selecting their place of work and residence and helps create more equal living conditions.
Public transport system comprising rail and road in cities is generally run by the public corporations like city and town authorities. Pakistan cities lack such a facility.
The past governments, no matter what their hue, did not seem to have been moved by common peoples’ agony or presence of popular opinion to revive the dismantled public transport system.
Government buses, including double-deckers, used to ply in cities and on inter-city routes at the time of country’s independence and the system remained operative till mid 80s. The older generation could still view double-decker buses, painted in red, plying in Lahore. For students a ride on the upper deck of the double-decker ‘omnibus’, as these were called then, was a real treat. Karachi also had tram and a circular rail.
The public transport system deteriorated over the years due to a combination of factors, including bureaucratic and trade union corruption and inefficiency, which the government failed to stem in time. Instead of salvaging the ailing system successive governments found an easy way out by jettisoning their obligation towards the people. The common people were thrown at the mercy of private transporters.
The public transport system, comprising overloaded buses and wagons, now being operated, especially in the cities, by the private sector, is extremely degrading.
Students sitting on rooftops and precariously clinging to the buses and holding on to life by the eyelids, are an everyday scene in the cities and suburbs, vagaries of weather not withstanding. While a predominant number of students make it to educational institutions on buses and wagons under unmitigated travails, the children of feudal class, business tycoons and bureaucrats travel in luxurious vehicles. The government seems oblivious to the social chasm being created in the younger generation.
Developing an underground rail system is the only answer to the traffic problem of mega cities of the country. Projects like Karachi mass transit system have not materialized so far. World over, underground rail networks, called subways in America, Metro, in France and Russia and ‘Tube’, in Britain, are being operated, besides light rail transit systems, for the convenience of the urban commuters.
Developed and developing nations alike, including India (Underground is being built in New Delhi also) are building or extending the existing networks of underground transport systems and are reviving trams in the cities. Los Angeles opened its new metro red line in Jan 1993, and its metro link commuter line to riverside in June, the same year. Metro extensions were reported from as far as Berlin, Calcutta, Lisbon, Naples, Shanghai and Tokyo, in 1993. A host of other cities, including Amsterdam, Cairo, Mexico city, and Omsk, were constructing new light rail transit or metro extensions. Trams were also plying in Moscow, which also boasted of a metro. London’s silver jubilee underground rail was also being extended.
Trams were also being revived in several countries. Belgium, Germany and France, reintroduced the system to combat congestion, while China was studying how to convert an old air-raid shelter into 5-km underground tramway. Brazil still led the way with innovative approaches to bus use, exemplified by its six door buses carrying 270 passengers on its “direct route tube” system. Germany introduced an H-Bahn automatic transit system in Dortmund by reviving a suspended railway. In downtown Hong Kong the world’s longest escalator system measuring 800 meter and comprising 20 escalators and three moving sidewalks operated at a cost of some HK$208 million. Some cities have even introduced Braille subway map for the visually impaired. The Russians have drawn paintings and murals on their marble-tiled metro stations.
Punjab government is reportedly planning to run buses in some cities and on inter-city routes under some franchise arrangement, which is unlikely to deliver. Instead of adopting a lily-livered approach to this grave problem which might aggravate further due to hike in fuel prices in the wake of possible world conflicts in the days ahead, the federal government needs to evolve a comprehensive plan to provide relief to the suffering millions.
Japan, Britain, France, Russia and even Ukraine, having necessary expertise in the field could be approached to construct a viable underground rail system in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, on built-operate-transfer (BOT) basis.
AN efficient and developed public transport system in a country not only ensures easy mobility of its people but also offers them wider choice in selecting their place of work and residence and helps create more equal living conditions.
