Delhi govt's insane idea to curb pollution

At Rs 140 crore per km, an elevated corridor will cost about the same as Delhi Metro’s Rs 160 crore, says Subir Roy.

Delhi’s one-year-old Aam Aadmi Party government can be credited with one good idea and one which borders on the insane.

The good idea is the odd-even scheme for cars (odd and even numbered cars allowed on alternate days) which worked, bringing down pollution appreciably and traffic congestion significantly.  

The scheme was carefully worked out with sensible exceptions and the launch helped by volunteers.

It had precisely the kind of public participation and police buy-in which the ill-fated and now discontinued bus rapid transit (BRT) system did not.

The success of the trial has prompted the government to indicate it will relaunch the scheme in a month or two. 

The horrendous idea is to announce, while burying the BRT experiment, that it will be replaced with a double decker elevated corridor - one for buses and one for cars.

There are at least three reasons working against it. First, the huge cost.

At Rs 140 crore per km, it will cost about the same as Delhi Metro’s Rs 160 crore. Compared to this, BRT cost around Rs 10 crore per km.

Second, emission/pollution per passenger ride will be significantly higher for the elevated corridor than for metro rail. Delhi will thereby retain its place at the head of the global league table of polluted cities.  

Third, the elevated corridor, instead of discouraging car use and ownership, will actually encourage it.

If you have the money - in Delhi a lot of people do - you will be able to both buy a car and pay the toll charge to use the elevated corridor.

The trade-off will then be between a nice car ride for a small minority and the enormous cost to public health which will become more and more glaring over time.

And we are not even counting the ugliness that results from a concrete monstrosity slicing a road or area into two. 

One reason why the odd-even experiment succeeded was it did not create unbearable hardship for the public.

This was partly ensured by the administration being able to put on the road a number of additional buses.

Perhaps the wisest decision announced is that by the year-end the city will have 3,000 more buses.

If this can be done along with making bus services frequent and - most important - predictable, then it will be a winner.  

An absolute must to ensure predictability in bus services is to bring all buses under a GPS (global positioning system) enabled monitoring system.