The path ahead: shaping Kochi’s integrated transport network 

Anyone who has travelled widely will acknowledge that, apart from being a top global tourism destination, Kochi is one of the most liveable cities in Asia. It is just the right size to offer all the facilities and benefits of a modern metropolis without the daunting challenges that mega-cities face. Most importantly — and this factor is often overlooked — it has little of the distressing inequality or the stark contrasts of wealth and poverty that characterise many other metropolises.

Kochi stands out, as does the rest of Kerala, because nearly everyone has reasonable access to basic livelihoods as well as to public healthcare, the judicial system, and education.

However, much remains to be done to improve the quality of life and ease of living for city dwellers. Apart from basic necessities such as potable water and sanitation, a well-functioning public transportation system is crucial to making Kochi a truly modern and liveable city. The benefits of efficient transport flow into nearly every aspect of life — improving economic prospects, healthcare outcomes, and public safety, especially for women, saving time, attracting investment, and promoting greater equality of opportunity.

Creating an integrated public transportation system has been a major challenge for Kochi, particularly since the city has grown by happenstance in an unplanned way, with narrow roads and limited space for creating viable transit corridors. While private vehicles consume most of the road space, public transport, with a 51% modal share, makes up less than 10% of the vehicles on the road. In other words, transportation here is quite undemocratic, with cars for the well-off dominating the road space.

The commencement of the Kochi Metro Rail project in 2012 marked the beginning of an effort that extended beyond creating a linear metro system running through the spine of the city. The Kochi metro, from its inception, was envisioned as a catalyst for integrating all of the city’s transportation systems — buses, autos, boats, and suburban trains — into a seamless network, providing convenient interchangeability between these various modes. Since private transportation was bursting at the seams, with cars inching along the city’s narrow streets, the expectation was that the ease and convenience of the metro rail, with last-mile connectivity provided by feeder services, would induce more people to shift from private to public transportation.

Kochi can thus be the first city in India to provide a comfortable, convenient, and fast public transportation system that reduces people’s dependence on private vehicles for urban mobility. The Unified Metropolitan Transportation Authority (UMTA) was also set up to provide the legal framework for creating this network, which would integrate all forms of public transport.

While the metro rail has been successful, receiving a good response in terms of passenger numbers and operational profits, the larger vision of leveraging the metro to create a well-functioning integrated public transport system has been a much more daunting challenge and will take time. A good beginning has been made with the feeder buses and autorickshaws, but these need to be reliable and consistent, with minimal waiting times when switching between modes of transport. It would also help if the city’s elite set an example by abandoning their cars for city mobility and switching to metro-linked public transport. As the former Mayor of Bogotá famously said, “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transport.”

When the Kochi metro’s implementation was well under way, it was realised that a truly effective mobility plan would also have to incorporate the city’s backwaters and waterways, as around a fifth of the greater Kochi urban landscape is comprised of waterbodies. Moreover, the multiplier effect of improving water transport was very high, as it would enhance economic opportunities and ease of living for communities in areas surrounded by water, who otherwise had to endure long commutes to reach their workplaces. Thus was born the idea of the Water Metro, and today Kochi is one of the very few cities in the world where the metro runs along waterways as well.

It was’nt easy to secure funds for the Water Metro project, and the German funding agency KfW was approached for assistance. The agency’s funding team, which visited Kochi, was charmed by the city’s backwaters as well as by the project’s potential to improve lives and livelihoods, and they agreed to provide funding. The Water Metro project has already become a trailblazer nationally and is gaining international recognition, and once completed, it will transform the city’s transportation landscape.

Thus, Kochi is hopefully well on its way to becoming the first city in India where the public transportation system works as an integrated whole, providing timely, comfortable, and convenient mobility across the city, and one that more people choose over crawling in personal vehicles along congested streets. Of course, much more needs to be done to realise this vision, and significant political and administrative will, along with ‘mission-mode’ efforts, are required.

If the city succeeds in knitting together water transport, buses, and autorickshaws in this fashion, with the metro rail as the spine of the network, Kochi can truly become a global model for public transport and well on its way to becoming a world-class city.

(The writer is the former managing director of Kochi Metro Rail Limited)