Ridership improvement study of light rail: A study of mono rail, Mumbai

Abstract

Transit access is essential for the prosperity and economic health of a country. In metropolitan cities like Mumbai, which are also known as the engines of economic growth , public transport provides an essential service option to cut down pollution, congestion and has various social as well as economic benefits. They provide better access to jobs and various other destinations to enhance business productivity. If this public transit system were to stop suddenly, the entire transportation network will come to a hault. This will lead to a complete choke of the city’s economy. Public transit has become one of the major services to support various public policy goals like improvement of air quality, reduction in congestion, better accessibility to jobs and employment sites, reduction in per-capita fuel consumption, enhance livability etc. The service is increasingly getting accepted around the world for combating various transport problems at various levels. However, public transit systems also often face hardships in terms of public acceptance and cost over-run. There are numerous case examples around the globe where the public transit systems are failing to even recover their operating cost. One of the main reasons that may be attributed to this phenomenon is Low transit ridership. Transit ridership basically refers to the number of people using the transit facility in a give duration of time. This study basically outlines a similar case of public transit systems in one of most busy Metropolis in the world i.e. Mumbai. Mumbai Mono-rail is the only existing mono-rail in the country after Patiala state mono-rail was stopped in the year 1920. Mono-rail was introduced in the north eastern corridor of the city where MMRDA felt the need to integrate Rapid public transportation system within existing urban infrastructure cutting across residential and business districts keeping within existing road development lines and without involving excessive property acquisition. The entire stretch of Mono-rail is 20.21 km. The Mono-rail, Mumbai was constructed in two phases. Phase 1 is of 8.93 km length that connects Chembur to Wadala Depot. Phase II of Mono-rail, Mumbai which connects Wadala Depot to Sant Gadge Maharaj Chowk is 11.28 km in length. At present only phase I is operational. Phase II is expected to be operational by October, 2017. The entire system expense was around 2,100 crores INR, where it was estimated that for the phase I (currently operational) the ridership would 51,435 persons per day. However, the system is undergoing a woeful juncture where the ridership is not even reaching beyond 16,000 persons per day. The system is facing a loss of INR 2 crores per month. In order to compensate with such heavy loss and low passenger ridership in the system, the frequency of the service which once started with 5 min has now been raised to 19 min. Hence, the entire purpose of a public transit system was lost. The trend data for Mono-rail ridership shows a negative drift after the change in frequency to 19 minutes. This study is basically to understand the reason for such low ridership of Mono-rail, Mumbai and recommend possible strategies to combat the ridership problem. The author was duly aware of the fact that the inception of the second phase of the Monorail will have an influence on the entire system and the ridership respectively. Hence, both the phases were taken up for this study. Identification of problem was done by evaluating the system based on internal and external factors. Internal factors are those factors that can be altered/ influenced by the wishes of the transit authorities. Internal factors include speed, frequency of service, feeder (if owned by the transit agency), network elongation, increase/ decrease in number of stops. Similarly, External factors are those factors that cannot be altered on the wishes of the transit authorities. This includes factors such as development pattern, policy regulations, land use etc. In order to evaluate, these complex net of factors, a project methodology was adopted as suggested by the Transit Research Board, Washington. The methodology suggested that the first step of any such evaluation begins with whether the Mono-rail alignment is en route with the travel demand or not. This step essentially envisages whether the Mono-rail alignment is taking people from their homes to their respective destinations or not. If the alignment is irrational, any set of factors such as enhancing speed, frequency etc. cannot improve the condition. This requires network related problems to be sorted out first. However, if the alignment is en route with the demand then the problem may lie in factors such as low speed, low frequency, policy regulations etc. The study involved a deep analysis of the system through various primary and secondary data. Primary survey included house-hold survey of the people living in the corridor, which primarily outlined the socio-demographic characteristics of the people living in the study area. It also included a household’s trip diary survey to understand the travel pattern in the study area. Secondary data collection was done majorly for the defined external factors, that included land use, employment density etc. First level of analysis dealt with the rationality of the Mono-rail alignment. Based on the trip pattern in the study area, it was later found that the alignment of the system was irrational. The alignment essentially connected all the residential (origin) points; however it hardly connected the major employment sites, or major railway stations. Lack of integration among modes was quite evident in the study area. Along with that, people showed their dissatisfaction with the feeder service and the frequency of Mono-rail. Also, when a willingness to shift survey was conducted for the second phase of the system, almost 72 % of the identified sample households said that they were un-willing to shift to the system. Majority had their reasons that the system essentially takes them nowhere. The final recommendation came in the form of network re-design, which essentially meant elongation of mono-rail network along with connecting it with feeder system as well as the sub-urban railway network. At last based on the proposals or recommendations the change in ridership was predicted using multinomial logit model.