- Email: [email protected]
Case studies of sustainable transport in India: An introduction
Case Studies on Transport Policy 3 (2015) 285–286
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Case Studies on Transport Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cstp
Editorial
Case studies of sustainable transport in India: An introduction
Ever since the onset of economic reforms in early 1990s, India has experienced rapid economic growth along with increase in prosperity and income levels of citizens. However, this economic growth has also resulted in exponential growth of private vehicle ownership and use, which coupled with increase in population and other related factors, has resulted in transportation problems, namely accident, congestion, and pollution, at a severe level. Considering these problems and also with the realization that multi-modal transportation infrastructure forms the important backbone of the country’s economy, the Indian government, in its 12th five-year plan, has earmarked substantial share of total investment in infrastructure exclusively for transportation infrastructure. Also, this current and planned investment is spread across all sectors of transport (road, rail, air, and water) as well as at all levels (urban, regional, inter-city, and rural) for both passenger as well as freight movement. However, within all these efforts, there is a growing concern to streamline the investments in the direction of achieving sustainability in transport within all sectors and levels and therefore, the word ‘sustainability’ has attained a prominent place in all transportation planning, policy and other documents. Government of India at various levels have been taking various policy and infrastructure initiatives to bring sustainability in transport in India. However, so far in India, the impact of such measures on sustainability has not been understood effectively. In this regard, collating research case studies on India related to sustainable transport will; on one hand give an overview of possible scientific approaches to address sustainability, and on other hand will help improve our understanding about the potential benefits/drawbacks of such policy and infrastructure initiatives being taken up by governments. It can further provide sufficient insight and decision support to select best combination of strategies for implementation in India and other developing countries. This volume of Case Studies on Transport Policy is devoted to publishing selected original research articles in the context of case studies of sustainable transport in India at all levels (urban, regional, inter-city, and rural) and for both passenger and freight movement. Selected set of papers were chosen mainly from: the Special Session of Transportation Research Group of India (TRG) held in World Conference on Transport Research (WCTR) at Rio de Janeiro during July 15–18, 2013; and 1st Conference of Transportation Research Group (CTRG) held at Bangalore, India during December 7–10, 2011. The authors of these papers were invited to submit their full papers for further consideration and review for this special issue. After rigorous review process as per the standards of the journal; this issue recognizes 7 papers out of
13 submitted initially, which I consider a good fit to the theme of the issue. These seven papers together cover various aspects related to special issue theme, like; optimum rural bus services, Public Private Partnership (PPP) in railways, car ownership and dependence in India, accessibility to health facilities in rural areas, sustainability impact assessment of transportation policies, bicycling policies for small cities, impact of induced traffic on highway feasibility. They have been selected after rigorous review by a number of experts in the academic and research community. The topics are related to real-world issues and the findings are of interest to both the practice community and the research community. The paper by Dandapat and Maitra titled ‘‘An approach for identifying optimal service for rural bus routes’’ demonstrates the selection of optimal bus service attributes by giving due considerations to user costs and operational viability. The results indicate the influence of route characteristics, demand level, user costs, required cut-off revenue, etc. on the optimal rural bus service attributes. A model is developed for simulating passenger movements and identifying the optimal service attributes for a demand level, which is applied on different hypothetical scenarios in order to understand the variation of the optimal attributes with demand and route characteristics. The findings indicate that it is necessary to give due considerations to the demand and its distribution as well as length of different routes while recommending an optimal fare model for all the routes in a geographic region. Through the paper titled ‘‘Framework for structuring public private partnerships in railways’’ Gangwar and Raghuram explored the potential of various unbundling approaches to come up with a framework that helps policy makers in taking macro level decisions on PPP structuring. The research disaggregates the railway system into over 40 ‘elements’ wherein an element is the smallest unit that can be given to a party for execution. They proposed sustainable PPP model by bundling the elements horizontally and/or vertically into ‘entities’ to extract the best value for a PPP. The governing principles used are; scale economies (horizontal integration), scope economies (vertical integration), need for competition (horizontal disaggregation), level playing field, transactional transparency, and need for specialization (vertical disaggregation). In the paper titled ‘‘Growing car ownership and dependence in India and its policy implications’’ Verma M. studied the antecedents of car ownership in India with respect to: attitudinal factor, safety factor, time and cost factors and environmental factors and addressed questions like: why people in India wish to own a car, how dependent car owners are on their cars, in what
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cstp.2014.12.001 2213-624X/ß 2014 World Conference on Transport Research Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
286
Editorial / Case Studies on Transport Policy 3 (2015) 285–286
circumstances they may be willing to shift to sustainable modes like, public transport, etc. The policy implications of car ownership trends are also discussed in the paper. The paper by Kanuganti et al. titled ‘‘Quantification of accessibility to health facilities in rural areas’’ attempted to quantify the impact of road infrastructure investments under Govt. of India’s Prime Minister Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) program, on accessibility of health facilities in rural areas. The methodology includes three different multi-criteria decision making analysis tools: Simple Additive Weightage (SAW), Fuzzy aggregation method, and Fuzzy preference decision analysis. Further these three methods are critically analyzed for their suitability to quantify accessibility to medical facilities. Through the paper titled ‘‘Sustainability impact assessment of transportation policies – A case study for Bangalore city’’, Verma A. et al. proposed a model for assessing the impact of various transportation policies and projects based on the variation in three pillars of sustainability – environmental, economic and social. The methodology consists of determination of different indicators of sustainability pillars and thus the Composite Sustainability Index (CSI) before and after introduction of a transportation policy. A case study for the city of Bangalore is taken where the sustainability impact due to introduction of congestion pricing in the CBD, during peak hour, is tested. The result shows an increase in CSI by 1.7% due to introduction of congestion charging. The paper by Majumdar and Mitra titled ‘‘Identification of factors influencing bicycling in small sized cities: A case study of Kharagpur, India’’ investigated the factors influencing people’s mode choice in general and bicycle mode choice in particular. They identified specific attitudinal attributes related to physical factors, psychological factors, travel time sensitivity, economic aspects, congestion, parking, route or link level facilities, route topography, safety related factors, security related factor, environmental awareness and weather related factors, that influence bi-cycle mode choice in a small Indian city Kharagpur. The results reveal
physical factors, safety related concerns and route topography to be the key and common set of parameters influencing bicycle choice both from the users and as well as expert’s point of view. The final paper by Ponnu et al. titled ‘‘Effect of induced traffic on feasibility of highway projects using economic analysis: A case study in India’’ uses travel-cost elasticity to study the effects of induced traffic for an Indian highway project in terms of economic impacts and compares the results with the conventional lane-km elasticity method. It is found from the study that considering induced traffic by both these methods changes the economic indicators by different amounts. Hence, ascertaining the best method by comparing with real traffic counts assumes great importance. This paper also suggests preferring travel cost elasticity as even lane-km indirectly accounts to travel cost savings due to additional lane-km added to the facility. It is my hope that these papers provide real insight into issues of sustainable transport in India and offers scientific review and methods that can be used to address the unique problems and issues faced by India and other developing countries. I truly appreciate Professor Rosa´rio Maca´rio, Chief Editor of Case Studies on Transport Policy, for giving me this wonderful and precious opportunity to organize this volume.
Ashish Verma Guest Editor Assistant Professor, Department of Civil Engineering and Centre for Infrastructure, Sustainable Transportation, and Urban Planning (CiSTUP), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore 560012, Karnataka, India
E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected] (A. Verma). Available online 19 December 2014
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Case Studies on Transport Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cstp
Editorial
Case studies of sustainable transport in India: An introduction
Ever since the onset of economic reforms in early 1990s, India has experienced rapid economic growth along with increase in prosperity and income levels of citizens. However, this economic growth has also resulted in exponential growth of private vehicle ownership and use, which coupled with increase in population and other related factors, has resulted in transportation problems, namely accident, congestion, and pollution, at a severe level. Considering these problems and also with the realization that multi-modal transportation infrastructure forms the important backbone of the country’s economy, the Indian government, in its 12th five-year plan, has earmarked substantial share of total investment in infrastructure exclusively for transportation infrastructure. Also, this current and planned investment is spread across all sectors of transport (road, rail, air, and water) as well as at all levels (urban, regional, inter-city, and rural) for both passenger as well as freight movement. However, within all these efforts, there is a growing concern to streamline the investments in the direction of achieving sustainability in transport within all sectors and levels and therefore, the word ‘sustainability’ has attained a prominent place in all transportation planning, policy and other documents. Government of India at various levels have been taking various policy and infrastructure initiatives to bring sustainability in transport in India. However, so far in India, the impact of such measures on sustainability has not been understood effectively. In this regard, collating research case studies on India related to sustainable transport will; on one hand give an overview of possible scientific approaches to address sustainability, and on other hand will help improve our understanding about the potential benefits/drawbacks of such policy and infrastructure initiatives being taken up by governments. It can further provide sufficient insight and decision support to select best combination of strategies for implementation in India and other developing countries. This volume of Case Studies on Transport Policy is devoted to publishing selected original research articles in the context of case studies of sustainable transport in India at all levels (urban, regional, inter-city, and rural) and for both passenger and freight movement. Selected set of papers were chosen mainly from: the Special Session of Transportation Research Group of India (TRG) held in World Conference on Transport Research (WCTR) at Rio de Janeiro during July 15–18, 2013; and 1st Conference of Transportation Research Group (CTRG) held at Bangalore, India during December 7–10, 2011. The authors of these papers were invited to submit their full papers for further consideration and review for this special issue. After rigorous review process as per the standards of the journal; this issue recognizes 7 papers out of
13 submitted initially, which I consider a good fit to the theme of the issue. These seven papers together cover various aspects related to special issue theme, like; optimum rural bus services, Public Private Partnership (PPP) in railways, car ownership and dependence in India, accessibility to health facilities in rural areas, sustainability impact assessment of transportation policies, bicycling policies for small cities, impact of induced traffic on highway feasibility. They have been selected after rigorous review by a number of experts in the academic and research community. The topics are related to real-world issues and the findings are of interest to both the practice community and the research community. The paper by Dandapat and Maitra titled ‘‘An approach for identifying optimal service for rural bus routes’’ demonstrates the selection of optimal bus service attributes by giving due considerations to user costs and operational viability. The results indicate the influence of route characteristics, demand level, user costs, required cut-off revenue, etc. on the optimal rural bus service attributes. A model is developed for simulating passenger movements and identifying the optimal service attributes for a demand level, which is applied on different hypothetical scenarios in order to understand the variation of the optimal attributes with demand and route characteristics. The findings indicate that it is necessary to give due considerations to the demand and its distribution as well as length of different routes while recommending an optimal fare model for all the routes in a geographic region. Through the paper titled ‘‘Framework for structuring public private partnerships in railways’’ Gangwar and Raghuram explored the potential of various unbundling approaches to come up with a framework that helps policy makers in taking macro level decisions on PPP structuring. The research disaggregates the railway system into over 40 ‘elements’ wherein an element is the smallest unit that can be given to a party for execution. They proposed sustainable PPP model by bundling the elements horizontally and/or vertically into ‘entities’ to extract the best value for a PPP. The governing principles used are; scale economies (horizontal integration), scope economies (vertical integration), need for competition (horizontal disaggregation), level playing field, transactional transparency, and need for specialization (vertical disaggregation). In the paper titled ‘‘Growing car ownership and dependence in India and its policy implications’’ Verma M. studied the antecedents of car ownership in India with respect to: attitudinal factor, safety factor, time and cost factors and environmental factors and addressed questions like: why people in India wish to own a car, how dependent car owners are on their cars, in what
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cstp.2014.12.001 2213-624X/ß 2014 World Conference on Transport Research Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
286
Editorial / Case Studies on Transport Policy 3 (2015) 285–286
circumstances they may be willing to shift to sustainable modes like, public transport, etc. The policy implications of car ownership trends are also discussed in the paper. The paper by Kanuganti et al. titled ‘‘Quantification of accessibility to health facilities in rural areas’’ attempted to quantify the impact of road infrastructure investments under Govt. of India’s Prime Minister Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) program, on accessibility of health facilities in rural areas. The methodology includes three different multi-criteria decision making analysis tools: Simple Additive Weightage (SAW), Fuzzy aggregation method, and Fuzzy preference decision analysis. Further these three methods are critically analyzed for their suitability to quantify accessibility to medical facilities. Through the paper titled ‘‘Sustainability impact assessment of transportation policies – A case study for Bangalore city’’, Verma A. et al. proposed a model for assessing the impact of various transportation policies and projects based on the variation in three pillars of sustainability – environmental, economic and social. The methodology consists of determination of different indicators of sustainability pillars and thus the Composite Sustainability Index (CSI) before and after introduction of a transportation policy. A case study for the city of Bangalore is taken where the sustainability impact due to introduction of congestion pricing in the CBD, during peak hour, is tested. The result shows an increase in CSI by 1.7% due to introduction of congestion charging. The paper by Majumdar and Mitra titled ‘‘Identification of factors influencing bicycling in small sized cities: A case study of Kharagpur, India’’ investigated the factors influencing people’s mode choice in general and bicycle mode choice in particular. They identified specific attitudinal attributes related to physical factors, psychological factors, travel time sensitivity, economic aspects, congestion, parking, route or link level facilities, route topography, safety related factors, security related factor, environmental awareness and weather related factors, that influence bi-cycle mode choice in a small Indian city Kharagpur. The results reveal
physical factors, safety related concerns and route topography to be the key and common set of parameters influencing bicycle choice both from the users and as well as expert’s point of view. The final paper by Ponnu et al. titled ‘‘Effect of induced traffic on feasibility of highway projects using economic analysis: A case study in India’’ uses travel-cost elasticity to study the effects of induced traffic for an Indian highway project in terms of economic impacts and compares the results with the conventional lane-km elasticity method. It is found from the study that considering induced traffic by both these methods changes the economic indicators by different amounts. Hence, ascertaining the best method by comparing with real traffic counts assumes great importance. This paper also suggests preferring travel cost elasticity as even lane-km indirectly accounts to travel cost savings due to additional lane-km added to the facility. It is my hope that these papers provide real insight into issues of sustainable transport in India and offers scientific review and methods that can be used to address the unique problems and issues faced by India and other developing countries. I truly appreciate Professor Rosa´rio Maca´rio, Chief Editor of Case Studies on Transport Policy, for giving me this wonderful and precious opportunity to organize this volume.
Ashish Verma Guest Editor Assistant Professor, Department of Civil Engineering and Centre for Infrastructure, Sustainable Transportation, and Urban Planning (CiSTUP), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore 560012, Karnataka, India
E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected] (A. Verma). Available online 19 December 2014