N. Raghuraman's column: Can we make one part of the body stronger by exercising?

When it started its first phase of services in 2015, the Chennai Metro Rail Limited (CMRL) had said that by 2026, 12 lakh people would be travelling on their trains every day. Two years before that timeframe, CMRL's daily footfall today is not even a third of that number. Why don't most people in Chennai take metro services? This is an interesting case-study that every city planner should pay attention to, in order to understand the needs of consumers. CMRL is busy building the metro, but it never asks people what their problems are. Many urban planners feel that if the metro is successful in Delhi, it should be successful in other cities as well. But that's not the case. Delhi is the only city where the metro route length is 350.4 km, while the second most congested city like Mumbai has only 59.2 km of route length. The second longest metro route in India is in Bengaluru with a length of 75.2 km. It is followed by Hyderabad with a length of 69.2 km. And the route length in Chennai is 54 km. Barring Delhi — where six million people use metro services — other cities lag far behind. In Bengaluru, this number is 7.5 lakh, while in Hyderabad and Mumbai only 5 lakh passengers use the metro services. Chennai has the lowest number of 3 lakh metro commuters. However, Bengaluru ranks first in terms of usage of metro in proportion to population, as about 7.5 lakh people use it daily out of a population of 1.4 crore. This is mainly because its other transport services such as municipal bus services have failed miserably. Mumbai has one of the most efficient and cheapest transport systems in the world, running for over 150 years. It is Mumbai local and no metro service can match its efficiency. But Chennai – since the British days when it refused to build railway services in the southern region – has been accustomed to bus travel and its bus transport is unmatched in terms of its frequency and ability to reach every part of the city. Chennai has the highest wheel-turnover of bus services in the country, which means that each bus here makes maximum trips in a day. Even Zhen-Zi uses buses instead of auto-rickshaws due to the excellent frequency of bus services and their ability to take them closer to their colonies, as auto-rickshaw drivers are usually infamous for robbing locals too. When a Chennai resident travels in the metro, he or she must take an auto-rickshaw for their 'last mile connectivity' (from station to residence), which charges four times the fare of the metro ticket. This is the reason why people there prefer to travel by bus, which takes them from the office to very close to their colonies. This saves them the cost of transportation. CMRL should have compromised with local bus services in Chennai, which could pick up passengers on arrival of every train and drop them closer to their home on normal bus tickets. This would have facilitated them and given a chance to the passengers accustomed to travelling in buses to enjoy the metro as well. Since transportation involves multiple modes and operators, everyone has to come together rather than competing with each other to lure customers differently. Most cities have the problem of 'last mile connectivity', which affects the footfall of the transporters. The funda is that just as a person cannot strengthen a single part of the body by going to the gym every day, the customer-base of any one part of the service cannot be increased without addressing transportation problems in their entirety.