Suggestions to address Pune's public transport issues

[Nikhil VJ]

Hi Friends,

When you have the time, please take a look, esp at the suggestion under "B] Solutions" in the email below, and give your thoughts on it? If it's a useless idea because of some fact that I've overlooked then please tell so.

(This started out as a personal blog post but could go further)

A] Problem Analysis

Table of daily revenues of PMPML from Dec 2012 to May 2013:

                        Per day  Per Bus    Daily Commuters         Daily Revenue

Dec 2012                     845                              11.06lakhs                   1crore 14lakhs

Jan 2013                      849                              11.15lakhs                   1crore 15lakhs

Feb 2013                     821                              10.89lakhs                   1crore 16lakhs

After 25% Fare Hike                                                                                                             [Anticipated] Daily Revenue

Mar 2013                    767                              10.11lakhs                   1crore 13lakhs                        1crore 45lakhs

Apr 2013                     757                              9.81lakhs                     1crore 16lakhs                        1crore 45lakhs

May 2013                    772                              9.63lakhs                     1crore 15lakhs                        1crore 45lakhs

 

(Pls see this in the word attachment shared by Bhanu-ji included in this email if you can't see the below one properly.)

Here are the same figures plotted on graphs:

  

From a systems perspective, this carries powerful inferences.

1. Pune's commuters, as an autonomous yet inter-related system (imagine they are the cells in a living organism), reacted non-linearly to the last major bus fare hike.

2. The commuters per day dropped.

3. This eliminated the PMPML's expected gains in revenue collection, which was based on the presumption that number of commuters would not change drastically. The linearly thought tweaking of the system backfired.

4. On the accounts side, it may look like "nothing changed". And that can give a sense of inertia too, to not change anything back. But there's more to this issue than just the account books. A worse chain of events may have gotten set in motion, which could escalate even further if the failed measure of hiking rates is continued.

5. So let's extrapolate this further. These dropping numbers mean that several routes that weren't the "chock-full" ones (like swargate to shivajinagar, for example) must be seeing chronically dropping occupancy : these would typically be the ones giving last-mile connectivity to citizens. In my personal case, bus 37 whose stop is very close to my home which I use regularly, usually runs below 50% occupancy, and it seems slated for a frequency reduction, which for most people who don't go at the fixed times, would translate to practically shutting off the route.

6. If a bus commuter loses the last-mile connectivity, or if that route becomes a very low-frequency one where one risks missing the bus and not getting another one soon enough, there is a far greater probability of the commuter opting out of using public transport completely. It's practical economics : The cost of going by auto for the last-mile connectivity, while using bus for the main routes, exceeds the comparative cost of using your own vehicle for the entire journey. And this cost is in terms of money as well as convenience. There is only so much inconvenience a citizen can put up with before opting for a more expensive option : a detailed research study may even yield a financial value to this "inconvenience" threshold for different classes, ages and genders.

7. This triggers off a vicious feedback loop. Bus routes get dropped, commuters drop out because of that, and even more bus routes get dropped because of commuters reducing... picture the veins of a leaf in your mind, and imagine the veins at the fringes disappearing, and those regions of the leaf shriveling and dropping off.

8. And hence the public transport system declines to a point where it is no longer a real public transport system; rather just a hypocritical pretense which only plies main routes, where anyways the volumes are high enough for the private sector to deliver equal or better service.

Basically, hiking fares in a public transport system, as well as low-frequencing and phasing out low-ridership routes : both knee-jerk reactive measures : can in the long run end up destroying the public transport system itself. And yet these are the first measures taken due to a flawed management model that's built for private enterprise, not public service.

At risk of being too speculative, I want to bring in this long-term pattern, as this is what the private vehicle industry has achieved in many cities around the world, slowly decimating their public transport systems and coercing citizens to switch to personal vehicles while greatly limiting mobility and prospects for the poorest sections. This long-term strategy is well underway in Pune in my opinion.

B] Solutions

So what to do if not hike fares?

"When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" : This proverb applies very well in this situation.

The argument that the public transport system must be subsidized by government is of course valid and I am in complete support of that.. public transport cannot be seen as an exclusive entity;  its profit-loss calculations should not be done independently as it enables thousands of enterprises in the city to turn a profit thanks to a lower bottom line, thanks to lower wages, thanks to lower commuting costs for the bottom-rung employees. A public transport system drastically increases a company's radius of labour and talent pool to tap from; and it is because of the same that cities like Pune and Mumbai can host so many companies and startups who can be competitive in national and international markets. 

But that doesn't mean we can't innovate to cut costs or improve services where there obviously is a need to do so. We can find solutions when we start to think "out of the box", "out of the bus", and see low-cost solutions employed in other cities in India. As an example, I'll share just one solution that I have personally witnessed and used for over an year:


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For many routes, PMPML can start plying smaller-size minibuses, or the shared-autos that are in use in many other Indian cities, which are designed to accommodate 9~10 people in a very small space footprint, and are far more comfortable on the inside than the "6-seaters" we see plying on some of Pune's exterior routes today. See the picture above for reference, it is from Udaipur, Rajasthan where public transport remains cheap and convenient thanks to such share-auto's, with official route numbers (sorry, can't find a pic of those right now), plying across the city. This can solve both the under-occupation and bad-frequency problems of many bus routes. There is no reason why a city's public transport system should use only large-size buses : please start to think out of the box, and let's use smaller vehicles where traffic or lane size is less and need for greater frequency is there.

I have no clue right now about the fuel consumption and capital cost comparisons between the standard large buses and these smaller vehicles, but am willing to bet that the figures will make it more economical to have smaller vehicles plying a bus route where current ridership is low and frequency is lower than 45 mins (ie, more than 45 mins to wait for the next one). It would be great if we can get the figures of per km fuel consumption (from real data, when plying in crowded city roads with frequent stopping and gear-shifting, mind!) of bus and smaller vehicles.. we can feed them into equations and work out at what point of commuter-numbers the different systems reach parity.

Note: Please keep fixed schedules and frequencies and ensure that the minibus / auto operator doesn't get into the habit of waiting for full vehicle to fill before leaving from base station. Meaning, "franchising" the public transport service to private players, in which the fare collections is their own thing, will not work, period. Like in public buses, the money that the vehicle's driver/conductor makes should be a fixed salary, the money paid to any private entity leasing the vehicles should be a fixed regular amount, and should NOT have any connection with the number of passengers they ferry. The whole incentives idea is a sham, as public transport is not about incentives and targets; it's about making transport from one spot to another available, punctual and affordable where private enterprise cannot do so. My observation of incentive models (particularly seeing the Delhi metro's feeder minibus route from Gurgaon to Dwarka when I was living there) is that these minibuses/share-autos end up waiting indefinitely for the vehicle to fill up, over-stuff people into the vehicle, and severely mis-maintain the vehicle to lower the bottom line. If PMPML uses minibus or share-auto instead of bus, the practice of fixed trip times and not incentivising the operators based on collections must stay. It is only the size of our buses that we should adapt.

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Cheers,
Nikhil
+91-966-583-1250
Pune, India
Self-designed learner at Swaraj University <http://www.swarajuniversity.org>
http://www.nikhilsheth.tk