The rapid-transit curse

Transport systems are the bane of a planner’s life in Karachi. That Karachi is desperately in need of rapid transport systems, bus lanes and a circular railway has been known for decades and there is yet to be a single system built and finished that will do anything to ease the multiple transport woes of an increasingly crippled city. Latest in the chain of bad-news transport stories is the Abdul Sattar Edhi Bus Line, formerly the Orange Line, that extends for four kilometres from the Orangi Town Municipal Authority to the Matric Board intersection. Or it would were it ever to be finished. As it is it stands as a monument to inefficiency and ineptitude, 60 per cent finished and with little possibility of being finished in the foreseeable future.

It was supposed to be operational in June 2017 and the latest completion date is May 2018 which anybody with a functioning pair of eyes can see is never going to happen. All the usual suspects are on parade. Poor cooperation between authorities, original contracts that were hopelessly under-priced and knowingly so, fights with contractors, sewer lines that have to be moved, likewise water pipes, assorted private hospitals in its path, several educational institutions, including the Jinnah Women University (and nobody noticed it was in the way?) as well as Al Khidmat Hospital and a host of other prominent buildings delivering crucial services.

Students that attend some of the affected schools and colleges are complaining of throat and respiratory conditions due to the dust and pollution raised by construction. Traffic is jammed nose to tail daily, men and women are injured trying to cross the chaos and shopkeepers complain bitterly of a loss of trade associated with the project. Even the contract to supply the buses to ply the route when finished cannot be completed in less than four months. Planning blight touches everything. Overlapping incompetencies work together, corrupt contractors fiddle the books and all the while Karachi chokes on its own dust. And who is responsible? Why Mr Nobody of course. Business as usual.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 17^th, 2018.

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