PAKISTAN: Old Railway in the Running for Rapid Transit Plan

By Zofeen Ebrahim Reprint | | Print |

Zofeen Ebrahim

KARACHI , Feb 5 2006 (IPS) - Transport authorities in this port city, that will host the Asian chapter of this year’s polycentric World Social Forum (WSF) in March, are looking at reviving a disused railway system, rather than building more concrete flyovers and underpasses, to ease congestion on the roads that has reduced traffic to a permanent crawl.

”These stop-gap arrangements and reactive planning would turn Karachi into another Bangkok,” says Arif Hasan, an urban specialist. ”Such quick-fixes only add to the congestion as these temporary solutions just move traffic smoothly till the next intersection where it gets clogged.”

Right now, progress on the roads of Karachi calls for skill in negotiating a clear path through an assortment of vehicles while also taking heed of yawning excavations for constructing new flyovers, underpasses and elevated transit-ways that no one is sure will ease the congestion.

Capital of Sindh province, Karachi is home to more than 12 million people and serves as the commercial hub and gateway of Pakistan – accounting for 95 percent of Pakistan’s foreign trade and contributing to 30 percent of the country’s industrial production.

But as the economy and population of Karachi expanded rapidly, few investments were made in the city’s urban infrastructure, resulting in a grossly polluted urban environment and chaotic public transport that has significantly reduced the quality of life.

Engineers and planners are at a crossroad. While a public-private partnership based on a modern, environment-friendly, mass rapid transit system beckons, reviving the neglected, Karachi Circular Railway (KCR), built over 40 years ago, looks equally attractive.

A 30- km arc, the KCR, is a single-lane track begun by Pakistan Railways in 1964, and in its heyday moved up to six million commuters daily. But since 1999, it has lain disused because it was toting up huge financial losses.

An attempt to restart it in 2000 failed for lack of patronage but then its managers discovered why – the system did touch the workplaces of the commuting population but went nowhere near the ever-expanding slums where most of the city’s working class lives. But planners are now looking at the possibility of integrating the railways into a system that involves high capacity buses.

To urban specialist Arif Hasan’s mind, the KCR still represents the basis for a ”cheap and logical” way out of Karachi’s traffic woes. What needs to be done is to ”use the existing tracks and set up a light mass rapid transit system” around it that would connect working places and residential areas, he says.

According to Hasan, the success or failure of reviving the KCR would depend on how well it can be married into a strong network of bus routes that allows the commuter to switch easily from rail to road and vice versa.

It is thus important that while new life is breathed into the KCR, bus termini, both inter and intra-city, need to be developed as also depots where the buses can be parked and maintained.

In the absence of both the termini and depots, roads are used for parking and repairing buses, adding to the congestion and chaos.

Plans for revitalization of the KCR have been doing the rounds for years now with one indecision lurching after another. There is talk of replacing it with an electric monorail and the technically advanced Maglev (magnetic levitation) technology – all of them prohibitively expensive.

”There is no public consultation (on finding a viable solution) and most importantly, people at the helm are more interested in grandiose and high-profile projects like flyovers and expressways,” says Hasan.

But discussions are now veering round to using the KCR corridors as a bus way, quite like the bus rapid transit (BRT) systems running successfully in Latin American cities with similar problems – like Bogota and Curitiba.

”This is the only way forward provided there is the necessary political will,” says Arif Parvaiz an independent urban consultant. City Nazim (mayor) Syed Mustafa Kamal said public consultation was needed before the BRT-KCR plan could be implemented and that there would be the interests of private transporters – who had taken over the public transport since its collapse in 1997- to be considered.

”Newer technology always meets with resistance. We need to educate and assure the transporters that the new system would be beneficial for them. At the same time we want educated people to invest in this industry,” Kamal said.

Proponents of the BRT say that the KCR corridors should exclude cars and be devoted to moving people rather than their vehicles – especially since one BRT can move as many passengers as can 125 cars.

In such a system, buses will be assured an exclusive track that is serviced by the railways with a common ticketing system that would make for huge savings on investments needed to build separate shelters. Frits Olyslager, an Australian expert here for a workshop organised last week by the city’s Mass Transit Cell, said it would be possible to get a BRT system up and running in just 18 short months, compared to the five years it can take to build an elevated railway.

”In the instant society that we live in, where we hate waiting, this is an ideal choice as it is reliable, convenient and efficient, with the bus corridor operating metro style and offering a ‘faster than car’ option,” Olyslager said.

So far, the new plans have the green light from the federal government which has pledged Rs 5 billion (83 million US dollars) from the central budget to induct 8,000 environment-friendly buses, over a period of five years, into Karachi.