The monsoon has not only left the city roads battered, it has multiplied the commuting time for most citizens. Not one stretch has been left unaffected. Commuters are forced to slow down at multiple locations owing to badly-potholed roads with powdery dust hanging in the air reducing visibility. “Earlier I used to take one hour 30 minutes to travel from A.S. Rao Nagar to Hi-Tec City. Now two hours 30 minutes is the minimum time I take. Five hours of my life are spent on the road,” says P. Dinesh who works in an IT firm near Cyber Towers.
“It is only going to get worse as the slowdown in traffic movement has reduced the availability of public transport. Four years ago, 3,600 RTC buses used to ply, on an average, 230-220 km per day. Now they are averaging 205 km a day. This reduction in the availability of public transport is pushing more people to switch to private transport which will further increase the travel time creating a vicious cycle,” says Prashanth Bachu, an urban transport specialist who earlier had worked with World Resources Institute. A back of the envelope calculation reveals that 15% dip in public transport facility, 7-8% growth rate of the city and higher reliance on private transport would lead to a tremendous rise in traffic congestion.
“A 15% dip in the public transport facility would have forced 15% to move to private transport. If we calculate the growth of the city between 7% and 8%, we can imagine the consequences,” says Mr. Bachu. “According to our estimate, the average travel in the city during peak hours is nine km per hour. A few years earlier, it was 14 km per hour. How it is impacting the commuters can be seen from the fact that during monsoon, many of our vehicles took hours to drop passengers,” says Prashant Garapati of Commut, a city-based mobility start-up.
Mr. Bachu cites the example of Bengaluru to show how the metro rail might not reduce congestion in the city. “Metro has been running for the past six years in Bengaluru. The congestion has not changed. In Hyderabad, the metro rail is expected to be fully operational in the next three to four years. By that time, the number of people in the city would go up. The road congestion will not change. There is the concept of Induced Travel Demand. The more roads we lay, there will be more vehicles. We have to incentivise group commuting to improve city life,” says Mr. Bachu.
The GHMChas announced a slew of steps that includes laying of concrete roads at major stretches and Urban Junction Improvement Plan, increasing carriageway width, free left turns and better signages and markings. But how useful these would be, only time will tell.
