Subways vs. Buses in India

...Further, they point out that this is especially true for those who leave unimposing but clean homes in compact villages, move into wretched hovels on the outskirts of large metropolises, and then must commute to work daily...

...This had been the recommendation of a World Bank team and of a study prepared by London Transport...

...The government authorized the 10.6-mile line believing it could count on Soviet help...

...Eventually, the loan was secured without any strings attached...

...The last is a critical matter...

...This has contributed to the nation's huge urban problems being generally overlooked—although with no fewer than 110 million people, India's cities are more populous than most countries in the world...

...In transportation, as in many other areas of life, Indian planners look to the West: If there are more people than a city's overland transport system oan handle, tile solution is obvious—go underground...

...Nevertheless, it was given up early this year in favor of a "sixth corridor": an extra suburban line, only a small part of which will lie underground...

...Not surprisingly, the team suggested a California-style freeway requiring, among other things, a long tunnel through one of the hills on which live this city's elite, and the reclamation of land along the coast...

...Third, poor countries necessarily employ the cut-and-cover—rather than tunnel-boring—method of building an underground...

...Buses in India BY DARRYL D'MONTE Bombay Many of India's city dwellers lead a subhuman existence, yet they are considered by both Westerners and by some of their own countrymen as better off than rural inhabitants...

...Following what has become a familiar pattern in the Third World, given its dependence on the industrialized societies, Bombay's planners toyed with the idea of a subway...

...But by the time the government picks up the final tab, the price is expected to have doubled...

...The story of Bombay's recent attempt to borrow $25 million to improve its bus system is instructive...

...Yet even in Bombay no official source will say it has been permanently eliminated from future consideration...

...In Bombay, where 1,400 local trains carry 2.7 million passengers daily, the transportation situation is especially acute...

...Any move in the direction of a regional approach must be accompanied by a freeze on industrial development...

...Before a loan could be granted, the Bank said, fares had to be raised...

...Few outsiders realize the amount of physical and emotional energy it takes merely to get from one place to another in an Indian city...

...Digging is in process at only four of 17 sites, and even the Railway Ministry (the project's sponsor) admits that barely one-tenth of the work is finished...

...The main reason for dropping the Bombay tube was its exorbitant price-tag—over $500 million, three times more than the corridor...

...Low-cost ways of transforming the face of the village are plentiful...

...Second, too many passengers would try to squeeze in and the doors would never close, making departure impossible...

...In January, after large sums had been spent to very little effect, it was announced that work on the road would be halted...

...Now, however, experts are beginning to confront the prevailing misconceptions...

...But the lack of enthusiasm among Indian transportation experts for what they consider too simplistic an answer to the transportation question does not encourage concentration on improving bad management...

...In addition, the original cost was placed at approximately $190 million, about a fifth of it in valuable foreign exchange...

...Yet another fiasco attributable to the unwillingness to recognize that Western ideas may not be suitable to a developing society occurred not long ago when the World Bank hired a team of Los Angeles architects to rid Bombay of its traffic congestion...

...planned for Delhi and Madras, and to forgo scheduled feasibility studies in the smaller cities of Ahtnedabad, Bangalore, Kanpur, Hyderabad, and Pune...

...After all, that is what London did back in the 1860s, and what practically every other metropolis worthy of the designation has done since...

...In Maharashtra, for instance, unless jobs are provided in the hinterland the exodus to Bombay—pegged at 300 villagers daily—will continue to overburden the metropolis...

...Unfortunately, the Soviets did not provide as muoh equipment as they had promised, so three years and $20 million later there is precious little to show for the effort...

...The practice, and the frequent accidents involving women and children at unguarded railroad crossings, account for an average of three deaths a day in Bombay alone, according to a recent estimate...

...Finally, the litigation required to condemn structures in the way of a "metro" is seemingly endless...

...But the swampy topsoil here—not to mention the traffic dislocations—make this construction process truly daunting...

...Ironically, almost nowhere in this country have transportation difficulties been tackled in terms of overall development within a region...

...And the problem is aggravated by the fact that the large majority of people commute from the northern suburbs to a commercial district crammed into a few square miles to the south...

...Enough unpleasant chores remain to be done, and immigrant shanty dwellers can still manage to find work...

...Such thinking produced the decision in 1974 to build a subway for Calcutta...

...In the short run, consequently, nothing less than the creation of massive year-round employment opportunities in the countryside can put an end to the remorseless tide of emigration with its attendant transportation and other problems...

...Bombay has managed this with reasonable success through the adoption of a strict zoning system—except that a little grease properly applied can help one around the law...

...If a summer subway ride in New York City can prove extremely unpleasant, despite the new air-conditioned trains, consider a jam-packed two-hour trip through India's airless underground...

...Trains are so overcrowded in this relatively tiny island city of 6 million that people think nothing of jumping on top of them to get to work on time...

...Apart from the overwhelming cost, several indigenous factors militate against building subways in Calcutta, Bombay or any other tropical and poor country, for that matter...

...In New Delhi, because of poor maintenance, only 75 per cent of the 2,000 buses were on the road last year...

...They note that while the urbanite may have greater income and more things to spend it on, the quality of life in Calcutta, Bombay, New Delhi, and Madras is extremely poor...

...The Japanese solution —hiring "pushers" to press people in—would not work...

...The rush hour congestion beggars description...

...As some MPs from the state of Maharashtra—whose capital this is—had argued in Parliament, instead of building a subway at a staggering price, it would make better economic sense to put a mainline railway track through the state's interior in order to generate commerce and jobs there...

...For all these reasons the subway should be dismissed as a wildly extravagant notion, ill-suited to the needs of countries like India...

...The same World Bank that advised spending half a billion dollars for a highly dubious underground, and presumably was prepared to participate in its financing, balked when it came to upgrading bus service...

...What the institution's financial wizards failed to realize, or deliberately ignored, was that fares have gone Up by about 40 per cent over the last few years, until buses have become more expensive than trains and therefore an unreasonable alternative for the impoverished commuter...

...Nor are native planners or the authorities who control Western funds willing to concede that in some circumstances buses are the most efficient mode of transport...

...First, the ventilation problems may be insurmountable...

...It takes time, though, for an industrial freeze to have an impact...

...The unhappy Calcutta experience may well prompt officials to abandon similar systems already Darryl D'Monte is the assistant editor of the Times of India...

...Here and in Calcutta, for example, commuters often spend four hours a day traveling to their jobs...

...It was a classic case of using scarce public funds for the benefit of a privileged minority—a mere 85,000 car owners...

...But the extent of the problem, and how it is being met, are indicative of the difficulties facing increasingly centralized Third World countries...

...India only lacks the will to push ahead with them and give up its pursuit of grand Western panaceas...