ANNOUNCEMENTS
Rapid urbanisation and need to meet the increasing demand of urban transport, India has experienced an exponential growth in metro rails. This calls for a need to examine the performances of existing metro rails. A comparative study on financial and operational aspects has been carried out with a focus on spatial development along the Kochi metro corridor. This involves analysing parameters like ridership, operational ratio, expenses, revenue and fare comparison, network lengths, funding and institutional mechanism for 7 cities – Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kochi, Jaipur and Lucknow. For the study on Kochi metro, understanding the route alignment, existing land use, travel pattern and a review of documents was carried out to analyse how have these reacted to recently come up metro in Kochi. This also included telephonic discussions with a very small sample size to understand the change in the spatial development.
The study revealed that such capital-intensive project which is incurring heavy loss year after year are not able to achieve even 25% of the projected ridership on an average. Instances from annual reports show that many cities are trying to depict better financial status by juggling the accounts. The metro fare is on an average 2.5 times costlier than bus. The average debt to equity ratio is seen to be 2.66 with interest free loans from government and other loans from foreign agencies. Kochi metro rail corridor doesn’t seem to experience any visible amount of changes in the land use as well as property prices. The documents whereas show that the focus primarily lies in improving multimodal integration. There is no special mention about changes in FSI and land use aspects which seems to be due to the Kochi city’s character and travel pattern.
Possible solution that were recommended as per the current scenario were, there is a need for intervention at policy level by keeping a check by making more stricter preliminary criteria with a revision on the same, under which metros are given approval; devising a fare fixing methodology; integration at institutional level with a separate fund allocation for transport and traffic infrastructure; prioritising the existing modes of transport; brining in place a uniform accounting system. So, there is need to conduct a serious critical review at multiple levels by the cities before opting metro since the current performance doesn’t seem to not meeting the expectations.
Key words: Mass Rapid Transit System, Metro rail, financial and operational analysis, Kochi Metro, spatial development
