Without a mass transit system, it’s a bleak picture for city’s commuters

Karachi

Experts believe that the city desperately requires a mass transit system, otherwise the problems faced by the commuters will increase manifold in the coming days due to the decreasing number of public transport vehicles.

They say the government needs to pay attention to the issue and merely hoisting banners that ask commuters not to travel on the rooftop of buses will not solve the problems.

As commuters cannot afford the high taxi and rickshaw fares, they have little choice but to travel on the rooftop of buses as there are not enough public transport vehicles to cater to the requirements of the city, they added.

According to the records of the Karachi Transport Ittehad (KTI), the representative body of public transporters, there are only 15,000 buses, minibuses and coaches for a population of around 18 million.

Two or three years back, there were 18,000 public transport vehicles plying the city’s road. However, instead of increasing, this number has declined. According to some estimates, 80 percent of the city’s population lacks personal conveyance and has to rely on public transport vehicles.

Around 70 or 80 percent of commercial vehicles have been converted to run on compressed natural gas (CNG).

The available public transport vehicles stay off the roads when there is no CNG at the filling stations, either due to the government’s weekly suspension or their owners’ protest against the retail price of the commodity, causing more problems for commuters. “There are 15,000 public transport vehicles for the city’s commuters, and only 2,500 or 3,000 of them are run on diesel. The rest have been converted to run on CNG,” KTI President Irshad Bukhari told The News.

Plans that didn’t work

The plan to introduce 4,000 CNG buses in the city for which the federal government had allocated Rs2.5 billion as subsidy does not appear to be materialising as its investors are reluctant to spend money on the project due to the fluctuating CNG price.

The 75 CNG buses owned by the defunct City District Government Karachi (CDGK) that were introduced on different routes are rarely seen these days.

Many of them have developed technical problems due to improper maintenance and negligence.

Around 65,000 CNG rickshaws have been registered in the city so far and they can also run on petrol. When CNG is unavailable, their operators demand exorbitant fares from commuters. The fate of around 25,000 two-stroke rickshaws that run on liquefied petroleum gas is also yet to be decided officially, but their operators earn well when CNG is unavailable.

The Karachi Circular Railways project is buried in bureaucratic files and there is little hope for its revival in the current circumstances.

The Bus Rapid Transit System is also in the doldrums as donors have backed out of the project. Currently, the authorities are searching for some other donors.

Posted in: Karachi News