Shirish Joshi
Architect/Urban Planner

Every city has its own way of working out key urban issues of respiration. Transportation is one of the most crucial and vital channels of the city respiration system. Some other systems of respiration are water, food, energy, waste, housing and education. I call them city respirators since these are all systems that define the daily, hourly and minute-by-minute rhythms of the city, just as a body breathes in and out. What the city breathes in must be released out in some form or the other. People who move out of their homes to work have to get back in the evenings.

On 3rd of May 2010, Mumbai witnessed a man made disaster specific to one of its respiratory systems but affecting and exposing all. This was an urban disaster caused by urban systemic breakdowns, which left 7 million mumbaikars stranded on train stations with no alternatives to take them back home post the working hours. 800 of the 1100 odd Central Railways and Western Railways motormen went on a hunger strike resulting in a total disruption of the train services in the evening peak hours. Although the railway boards choose to call it a disruption of only 70% of their services the fact of the matter is that the system collapsed in its entirety. The fallout of this affected other respiratory sub-systems such as the road network where tens of thousands of stranded passengers took their chances of getting back home. What this resulted in was a complete clogging of the entire system of transportation and the city just as a body falls when chocked to its neck, collapsed. This has happened several times before and clearly for Mumbai it is a chronic debility.

In the coming paragraphs I would like to highlight three core issues that are perhaps overlooked while receiving this particular disaster. First is the fact that this is an urban disaster. And in case of Mumbai it is a recurring one with its periodic patterns of return. Also in many ways this is a benevolent disaster. The second issue that has surfaced time and again but has been easily sidelined is the fact that we as the city of Mumbai – as architects, planners, designers, developers, law makers, politicians, bureaucrats, educationists and civic functionaries- have categorically failed, first, at taking stock of the situation where 7 million people rely on just two railway lines (that itself is good enough a crisis) and are still unable/unwilling to show any real innovative transportation alternatives. The third is the political inability of our leaders to take up this agenda as a serious issue and formulate a language that speaks to the people of Mumbai and aims at solving the pressing situation.

I will begin with the third crisis. A day after the disaster struck a solution is still not to be identified. The railway boards have announced that services will run at 15 % efficiency or less, expecting commuters to deal with the situation as their own personal crisis and find their own solutions. Although some local language dailies have called out the motormen and their demands as politically motivated; the claims of the motormen appear far more legitimate than the handling of the issue by the railway boards. Both the railway boards have chosen to take forceful actions against the agitating motormen by suspending 13 of them and the state home minister recommending that the Essential Services and Maintenance Act be invoked. Under the act, the strike can be declared illegal and the motormen can be arrested and fired. This is a clear example of how the top down system confronts and conflicts with the bottom-up crisis. Here is also how those who are responsible are unable to face up to their responsibility and at the least accept that they are unable to deal with the situation. The responsibility lies clearly with the State Home Minister along with heads of Railway Boards in Mumbai and Delhi (this includes the Railway Minister) and the Municipal Commissioner, Mayor of Mumbai and the Leaders of Opposition in Mumbai and the State of Maharashtra (for not making a real and legitimate agenda to confront the government on this issue). It also seems that not having any autonomy makes it easier for both the railway boards to pass on the buck to the central railway ministry, which takes all the decisions in matters concerning wages and perks. The crisis seems to be resolved for the time being with the Mumbai High Courts intervening, but with no real resolution of the demands placed by the motormen.

The second issue is the systemic dysfunctionality of Mumbai’s transportation system. It partly emerges from the structure of the city and its unique needs. To travel from east to west in the northern suburbs of Mumbai, train passengers must first travel all the way south to Dadar, transfer to another line and then go all the way back up again. This lack of lateral connectivity means that a journey that should take 15 minutes can become an hour long ordeal.  Feeding into this dysfunction is the lack of transportation alternatives. Connectivity by roads is hardly an alternative as this takes longer than doing the north-south-north train journey.  It is evident that train services in Mumbai had reached at peak of their capacities more than two decades ago. Our ‘imaginative’ solution? Adding three more compartments to all trains.

People want to see what alternatives can be deployed. They want to see pilot projects springing up here and there. They want to be able to move and not be transported as cattle.  It is also a well-established fact, which needs no further justification that unilateral solution cannot actually solve the current crisis. Building one metro line in the span of 5 to 10 years is not innovation. Innovative proposals need initial investments, which perhaps do not yield returns for many years. Take the example of BRTS (Bus Rapid Transit Systems), when first started in Bogotá, Colombia were making losses for the first eight years. Innovations need to be deployed at several scales simultaneously from the scale of the house to the bus-stand to the train-station and back. This particular respiratory system is plagued at every cross-section. It is surviving on life support system but is in need of a resurrection.

Some of the alternatives that the city can seriously look into are listed below. All these and many more alternatives exist and are functional in various cities across the world. Mumbai needs to learn and adapt these to its own situations. It needs pilot projects that can in the future be turned into viable transportation alternatives.

1. Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS): Mumbai immediately needs to initiate some pilot programs (on ground and not on paper) showing how successful BRTS systems can be. City of Ahmedabad and its version of BRTS called JanMarg is a very good example in India.
2. Initiate congestion pricing in core areas of the city and support them with excellent mass transit systems. This is very easily possible as a pilot project in the Central Business Districts in the Fort area and around the Mantralaya.
3. Encourage car-pooling and enforce it if required in certain areas of the city. This need not happen only amongst small core groups, it can be extended to the entire city. The city can have a car-pooling website where people can put up their journey information for others to patch up with. Information Technology will play a crucial role in creating such a network.
4. It seems that bicycles have totally disappeared from the city. Bring back bicycling and patch it up with mass transit. Scandinavian cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen are excellent examples of a bicycle-mass transit symbiotic movement system. Also the bicycle sharing system called Velib in Paris is a fantastic example.
5. Making water transport a reality. Cities like Hong Kong could be looked at as a best practice in water transportation.

At the policy level, it is of critical importance to put the pedestrian at the center of all urban movement strategies. It is draconian to expect that the automobile will solve our movement crisis.

Lastly I have chosen to call this disaster a benevolent one because events such as these bring out the systemic faults of a city. And people begin to experience how the lifeline of Mumbai can also become a serious man-made disaster. This incidence in particular is also an Urban Disaster as it has exposed the problems of uneven development with in the city. It has brought to the forefront the crisis of urban housing and its un-affordability in most areas of Mumbai. People having to travel 60 to 70 odd kilometers to get to work without a reliant and secure mode of transport, in conditions that can hardly be called human, cannot and should not be excused under the – chalta hai – attitude regime, particularly by the city makers. Having said that, the events of last night that left millions stranded at train stations or at workplaces have exposed the pernicious tendencies of our politicians for passing the buck, of our urban-planners and city officials for not constantly pursuing innovative alternatives of movement and the city dwellers - those who use mass-transit - for their passive non-resistance and the rich automobile folk for their usual “who gives a damn!” sensibilities.