Hyderabad: Metro won’t work unless integrated with other public transport

HYDERABAD: Just having an elevated metro rail project will prove of no help in improving urban mobility in Hyderabad, unless the government develops widespread rail connectivity across the city along with Bus Rapid Transport System (BRTS), said Pedro Ortiz, renowned urban planning expert and senior urban consultant with World Bank.

Ortiz was speaking at a plenary session on ‘Smart City and Urban Mobility’ at the tenth Urban Mobility India conference being conducted along with CODATU-17 conference in Hyderabad. At the session, he said that the existing network of railways in Hyderabad (refering to the network of MMTS), is very basic which does not work for a metropolis like Hyderabad.

Ortiz said, “Hyderabad has a commuter train system but you are not using entire potential of the commuter train. It just goes through center(of the city), from one side to the other. There are many more things to do in Hyderabad to integrate the metropolitan transport system as a whole. You are building Hyderabad metro, that is great but when I superimpose the two elements (metro and commuter rail system), I don’t see an interconnection, an intermodality between train and the metro. The metro stations do not go into train stations. You have to get down of the train and get the metro.”

Ortiz further said that commuter railway network plays an extremely strategic role in a metro like Hyderabad and gave examples of metros like London and Stockholm which have a widespread and efficient network of railways, necessary for people to travel large distances in a metro.
It may be mentioned here that the MMTS network in Hyderabad has a length of just 47 kilometers and is inefficient with trains running late most of the times with less frequency.

Ortiz also stressed on the importance of developing bus feeder services for the metro rail simultaneously with construction of metro rail infrastructure and not after the metro is constructed.
However, the current situation is such that there are not enough number of buses with good frequency even on most of the regularly used routes in the city.  He said that all the modes of transport need to be developed simultaneously and that these transport systems will not prove helpful unless they are efficiently integrated.