What is the issue?
According to recent findings Delhi Metro has failed to reduce surface traffic and city's air pollution.
What are the issues with Delhi metro?
- Delhi Metro has one of the lowest passenger-track ratios among the world's major metros, at less than 10,000.
- Delhi has fewer cars than required, and unlike peers its stations in heart of the city are few.
- Comparisons with cities in other countries show that, for its size, Delhi Metro carries far fewer “riders” than almost any other city’s system.
- With 314 km of track, Delhi has a daily rider average of 2.8 million, where China’s Shenzhen has a slightly smaller system (286 km) but carries 60 per cent more riders, at 4.5 million.
- And Singapore with less than two-thirds of Delhi’s track length, at 199 km, carries 10 per cent more riders than Delhi, at 3.1 million.
- There is no uniformity in numbers across the major Metro systems in the world.
What are the challenges in Delhi’s metro Infrastructure?
- Capacity of Trains - The majority of Delhi’s trains have six cars, while some have eight and some four.
- On most Metros, a range of six to eight seems to be normal, but New York usually operates between eight and 11 cars per train.
- With fewer cars than required, what the usually crowded Delhi Metro has done is to spend money on expensive infrastructure and then under-utilized its potential capacity.
- Frequency of Trains - In Delhi, the gap between two trains would appear to be more than three minutes at most times, and six minutes in outlying areas.
- Peak traffic times see the frequency increasing to a little over two minutes.
- The system seems unable to reduce that further to 90 seconds, achieved on other Metros.
- Network of tracks - In many cities, the heart of the city gets special treatment in terms of a very dense network of lines and stations.
- Paris has 245 stations in 87 square kilometer area in the heart of the city.
- In comparison, Delhi has only 229 stations in all, and much of the track length stretches out into the suburbs, near and far.
What measures needs to be taken?
- The range of good metro can be from a top figure of 34,000 riders daily for every kilometer of track in Tokyo and about 27,000 in Hong Kong, to 20,000 for Paris and so on.
- Delhi’s metro system should be aiming for a figure of 15,000, and possibly for 20,000 or a doubling of riders with the same track length.
- In Delhi metro, moving to a uniform system of eight cars per train would up ridership quite significantly.
- Delhi Metro’s future projects be focused more on the city Centre, rather than out skirts, to increase ridership, reduce surface traffic congestion and improve the city’s air quality.
Source: Business Standard
