You have to admit it – we have no dearth of variety when it comes to transport services. And as a city we have complained about all of them. Mind you, there are good grounds for complaining. The history of public transport in Madras is one of bright ideas that are poorly executed. And not one of them connects with another. Even the Madras Railway Company was described as beginning nowhere (Royapuram), going through nowhere and ended nowhere (Belgaum).
Among the first major public transport projects we had was the tram service, which we have already seen. There too, one of the chief reasons for failure was the faulty route design and an unwillingness to increase fares when viability demanded this. And even as the tram was being debated upon, we toyed with a monorail service. The builder Baron T. Namberumal Chetty invested in the Madras Monorail Company and got an experimental line running between Avadi and Poonamallee, which is probably the seed behind the relentless WhatsApp University claim that he owned a private railway line. Namberumal got his monorail going by 1905 and was all set to expand when the whole scheme was scrapped in favour of the trams. Interestingly, the monorail was again debated upon in the 1990s/2000s but then nothing came of it.
The next big project on tracks was the suburban railway service. Considering that we had the vision to link Tambaram with the Beach station via a railway line as early as in 1931, we did not do much with it. The core city remained untouched by this service and a golden opportunity was lost owing to lack of vision. Such a project would have been easy when land acquisition would have been that much simpler. True, the suburban line was extended to service the western parts of the city as well, but it has remained at best a peripheral service. In this Chennai is not Mumbai, whose lifeline is the suburban railway system.
MRTS was the next big project. And it dragged on forever in execution. Planned in the 1970s, sanctioned in the 1980s, constructed between the 1990 and the 2000s, and still work in progress! Apart from the disastrous consequences of building it on the Buckingham Canal bed, and its hideous stations, this project too never lived up to its potential. It operates in complete isolation from the rest of the transport systems, except for the occasional spots where it coincides. That it caters to around 100,000 commuters a day is beyond doubt, but it could have been much more.
The Chennai Metro Rail is the new great hope for the city. Phase I is already in operation (with thank goodness very elegant stations) and Phase II is under execution – and it is entering one of its toughest phases, with work to begin at Mylapore/Royapettah. If the project does not become a victim of centre/state politics of which there is every likelihood at this point, it will augur well for the city. The challenge here again, is ensuring last mile connectivity by means of feeder services. And the manner in which Metro will engage with the MRTS. In fact, CMRL for long debated over whether it could integrate the MRTS into itself but there is no clarity on this as yet.
Still, with all of these, an overarching body that can take decisions on seamless transfer of tickets, integrated transport services and taking advantage of synergy among the various forms, is very much the need of the city. And there is such a body – the Chennai Unified Metropolitan Transport Authority (CUMTA). On LinkedIn, this agency claims it is the nodal agency that brings together all the agencies working in the area of urban transport in Chennai to ensure seamless delivery of mobility services across various modes such as bus, metro rail, railway, walking and cycling in the Chennai Metropolitan Area. Through a people-centric approach, CUMTA aims to develop sustainable urban transport solutions that will be safe, inclusive, affordable, accessible and non-polluting.”
This body was approved by the legislature in 2011, but took its time in coming into existence, this happening only in 2019. Tamil Nadu has a long history of political regimes putting away bright ideas of their predecessors into cold storage. But even after 2019, CUMTA has had very little to show for it. But there is hope. Until then, our transport system on tracks and the others on wheels remain in separate silos. We are a long way off from the Oyster card for instance.
Published - August 22, 2024 12:49 pm IST
