TRANSIT NETWORKS AND ANALYSIS – BENGALURU

1. Introduction
India is urbanising rapidly. While 68.84% of India’s population still lives in villages, the 2001–2011 decade marked the first
occasion when India added a higher population to its cities than its villages. With Indian cities as engines of growth and primary
contributors to the country’s GDP (60% currently; expected to reach 75%–80% by 2030), eco-nomic migration to urban
agglomerations will only increase. India is projected to add approximately 404 million citizens to its urban population by 2050 —
the largest increase in the world.

1.1 Bengaluru – Brief Overview

Bengaluru, the capital of the state of Karnataka, is India’s fifth most populated metropolis. Founded in 1537, the city’s strategic
location and mild weather attracted the British who established a cantonment within the city in 1809, providing a fillip to trade
and growth. The city’s economic growth accelerated significantly after India’s independence in 1947, with the establishment of
numerous public heavy industries and educational institutions in the city. More recently, Bengaluru has become a hub for
Information Technology (IT) and biotechnology, attracting professionals from across the country. In this context, it is not
especially surprising that Bengaluru’s urban population growth rate of 46.68, between the 2001 and 2011 Censuses, was the
highest for any district in the country.

2. Existing Transport Scenario in Bengaluru

Unlike other large Indian cities such as Delhi, Mum-bai, Kolkata, and Chennai, Bengaluru does not currently possess substantial
rail-based capacity for intra- city passenger-trips, and thus still relies overwhelmingly on its road network for city transit. Multiple
studies have attempted to understand modal split — the distribution of overall passenger-trips in a city by different modes of
transport — patterns in Bengaluru. Three of the most recent analyses are listed in Table 1.

① https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/sites/casi.sas.upenn.edu/files/iit/GOI%202008%20Traffic%20Study.pdf.
② Unpublished data; study done by WRI authors Srikanth Shastry and Sahana Goswami.

2.1 Bus Services

As Bengaluru depends on its road network for transit, its bus system plays a critical role in public transport. Public bus services in
the city are operated by the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC). BMTC is the sole provider of bus-based
public trans-port services in the city, and its operations extend to urban, peri-urban and rural areas within the Bengaluru
Metropolitan Region. With an effective fleet of 6,218 buses serving a metropolitan area of 5,130 square kilometres, the
Corporation caters to 5.02 million passenger-trips on a daily basis, making it one of the largest city bus operators in the country.
The Corporation, along with several private fleet operators, also provides chartered services to major industrial and technology
parks as employee shuttles. While not ‘public’ transport in the strictest sense, these services serve to reduce the volume of vehicles
entering and exiting significant white-collar business clusters during peak hours.
① Data from http://rto.kar.nic.in > Vehicle Statistics > Bengaluru Metropolitan City as on March 2016. Accessed 02 May 2020.

2.2 Metro Services

In 2007, Bengaluru began construction of a metro rail system operated by the Bengaluru Metro Rail Corporation Limited
(BMRCL)— are operational, with a daily rider-ship of approximately 140,000. Phase I of this metro — a north-south ‘green’ line
and an east-west ‘purple’ line intersecting at Majestic, one of the city’s transport hubs — spans a total of 42.3 km. Initially
scheduled to be completed in 2011, the project has been plagued by delays; as of May 2016, the east-west line and the northern
portion of the north-south line — 27 kilometres in total.
② The Bangalore Metro project is being implemented by a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) called Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Limited (BMRCL) which is
jointly owned by the Government of India and the Government of Karnataka.
2.3 Rail Services

Unlike most metropolitan cities in India, Bengaluru lacks significant suburban rail services. While the existing railway network
links the city’s Majestic transit hub with multiple surrounding townships — not to mention several IT and industrial clusters on
the city’s periphery.

Figure 2. BMRCL and BMTC service coverage①

① Map created by the WRI team (Raj Bhagat and Abhishek Sobbana) using data collected from BMTC and BMRCL.

3. Approach

Given the current mode-share of public transport in overall passenger-trips in Bengaluru, it is evident that only a proactive
approach can enable a scenario where close to 80% of passenger-trips in the city are by public or Intermediate Public Transport in
2025. Our approach consists of three components which are articulated very briefly below:

Sustainable capacity augmentation: Proactive rather than reactive expansion of public transport capacity at a higher rate than
anticipated increases in transport demand. This requires a careful evaluation of costs, capacity, transit speeds and the gestation
period of different modes of transit capacity augmentation across the city. At present, BMTC buses and the purple Line of the
metro run to its capacity during peak hours, incentivising users to switch to private modes of transport.

Improving operational efficiency: The reliability of public transport is a major component of commuter decisions to switch to,
and continue using, mass trans-it. While frequency increases provided by fleet augmentation are a means to improving transport
reliability, increased operational efficiency through rationalized routing systems, better maintenance, and safety policies help
further improve transport reliability thro-ugh increased efficiency.

Improving service quality: Service quality also plays an important role in incentivising public transport utilisation. Above all,
public transport must afford a convenient and pleasant commute — convenience in terms of a fast, seamless journey and
pleasance in terms of fleet comfort and interaction with staff. This requires a high level of integration across transit modes.

4. Challenges

Two major challenges exist to improving public trans-port as a whole in Bengaluru: lopsided financial in-vestments in public
transport and the currently fragmented institutional setup that hinders co-operation and progress across transit agencies within the
city.

5. Conclusion

Bengaluru, currently the fastest-growing metropolis in India, is at a decisive point in its history. With most road infrastructure
heavily overloaded, city planners can opt for conventional solutions in wider roads and elevated corridors, further incentivising
people to use private transport. Alternatively, they can decide to use road capacity more efficiently by encouraging multiple forms
of mass transit — a critically necessary approach in the case of Bengaluru. In the context of mass transit in India, the current trend
in India is to prioritise capital-intensive rail-based system such as metros. Our research, however, indicates that Bengaluru will
remain heavily dependent on bus transit even after the introduction of rail-based mass transit, with 80% of public transit trips still
by bus.

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