Are Karachiites ready to give up their vehicles and opt for public transport?

PEOPLE with cars are usually people with power and they make the laws, argues Prof Noman Ahmed, chairman of the Department of Architecture and Planning at the NED University of Engineering and Technology.

Transport, he says, is essentially “a political issue”. Therefore, discussions related to the mode of transport are taken from political perspectives and “technocrats usually toe the line that is given by the decision makers”.

Still, says Prof Noman, that while the bus rapid transit (BRT) system may be ‘politically’ difficult, it is nonetheless, not altogether impossible.

In fact, eminent urban planner and architect Arif Hasan is so sold on to the idea that he says if the BRT is introduced, “the city will change and people will start using buses.” He passionately argues against the notion that cars and motorcycles are symbols of affluence or that rich people may be ill at ease seen using public transport.

“Everyone will use the public transport provided they are given clean, safe and efficient system,” he says, adding, “ambience determines human behaviour; give them all that and see how well they will adapt to it.”

When Enrique Penalosa, the mayor of Bogota, Colombia, in Latin America, decided to introduce the BRT system to Bogota in the 1990s (originally developed in Curitiba, Brazil in the 1970s), he faced stiff opposition from private bus companies and urban elites. Yet he remained resolute. “Today car ridership in Curitiba has been reduced by 30 per cent,” says Hasan.

What is a BRT really? It is not just buses moving in dedicated bus lanes, but a whole system that moves large masses of people, quite like London’s underground most of us are so familiar with, but on road.

These include segregated bus lanes on major roads, long buses with wide doors for exit and entry of passengers and pre-booking of tickets.

“It is a good solution. It takes less time and money to implement, is flexible in terms of an operating model, policy and management,” says Ahsan Siddiqui, CEO, Engineering Associates. EA carried out the feasibility for the city government on the BRT system last year.

Last year Frits Olyslager, an Australian expert, was also invited by the city government’s Mass Transit Cell. Trying to sell the idea, he had said then that it would be possible to get the bus system up and running in just 18 short months, compared to the five years it can take to build an elevated railway.

The federal government had also pledged Rs5 billion (83 million US dollars) from the central budget to induct 8,000 environment-friendly buses, over a period of five years, into Karachi.

Numerous studies and feasibilities have been done, foreign consultants are invited, but ambitious and well-tested successful plans like these just remain inside spiral-bound sheaves collecting dust in the confines of the Civic Centre building.

And admittedly, Olyslager may have been overly ambitious when he said the BRT could be set up in just 18 months. There are bottlenecks that have to be removed first.

“We lag in policy, regulation and management of the bus service without which it will not be possible to implement the system even if we manage to build infrastructure. We need to bring institutional changes and develop a policy for the operators alongside the infrastructure which includes dedicated bus ways, bus depots, fuelling stations proper bus stations and automated ticketing system etc,” enlists Siddiqui.

And more importantly, will a push for huge network of public transportation be acceptable to the Karachiites? Will they choose to abandon the comfort of their own private cars and use public transport?

“Culturally, we are not a people bound to our cars. Many of the people in the low income strata that drive cars or ride motorbikes do so out of desperation. The abysmal state of public transportation in the city has driven people to take out loans to buy private vehicles. If a proper network, which is safe, clean and affordable, is provided, there is no reason why people won’t use it,” Arif Belgaumi, member of the National Council, Institute of Architects, says with confidence. Like mayor Penalosa, Hasan too, feels a city has to be designed for people more than for cars.

We all know cars are going to increase every year. But, says Hasan, “We can’t indefinitely build further infrastructure to accommodate them.”

He was probably referring to the 24-km long Karachi Elevated Expressway (KEE), being constructed to ostensibly relieve Karachi of its burgeoning traffic chaos.

“Expressways are desirable where traffic flow velocities have to be maintained at a high value, especially for long distances, for example, where residential and work locations are spread out,” says Dr Ahmed.

Further, he says, “Since the expressways only shift the congestion from one point to the other, the congestion only moves from one point to the other. Underpasses and overpasses also tend to shift and re-shift the traffic congestion from the point where they are constructed to the adjacent location.”

“Studies have shown that building expressways only encourages more traffic to use it,” says Belgaumi, concluding there is “no demonstrated need for the KEE.”

To his mind the best way is to work out a strategy of separating corridors of movement for through traffic from local traffic, introduce policies to reduce the exponential rise in motor cars, increase in the number of buses and synchronize traffic signalling/monitoring system.”

As for its management, Prof Ahmed says: “A logical way to ensure the outcome is to constitute a city scale planning agency.”

Terming Karachi's master plan “a collection of instances of real estate opportunism looking for legal cover,” Belgaumi says: “Large cities are not run by more than a dozen separate land-owning agencies that hardly coordinate with one another. There needs to be a single master plan for the greater metropolitan area to which all are bound. Various projects have popped up over the last few months and have just been included into the master plan. City master plans are developed by a variety of professionals, city planners, urban designers, architects, engineers, politicians, sociologists, and ordinary citizens, all working together.” To make cities more liveable, he suggests involving the citizens. “They own the city, we work for them.”