Alternative systems for urban transport in India

This paper is in the context of studying alternative systems of urban transport in India to determine the costs and performance not only for public transport systems but also for the total transport scenario (i.e., for all vehicles) such that the economic costs are inclusive of costs of time (conservatively), accidents and pollution. In view of inherent deficiencies and delays associated with a traditional transport planning process and its implementation, the paper develops quick response land-use transport planning models for Indian cities to enable integrated, cost-efficient strategies to be evolved, recognizing that urban transport is a function of urban size, from, structure, socioeconomic base, etc. A simple statistically significant demand model identified from a basis of appropriate data represents the recommended demand model for Indian cities. This model can be then conveniently used to project trip volume for any Indian city in a future year. A simple gravity model is used to generate the trip assignment for hypothesized city sizes, forms and structures. The results provide a fairly reasonable approximation for the major corridor trip volumes and lengths in the context of the transport requirement for the metropolitan cities in India in 2001 and 2011 A.D. The GOI Study Group arising from the investigations reported in this paper and the discounted cash-flow method of analysis made clear overall recommendations in February 1987 for cities of various populations.