Collective mobility

The Green Line project is yielding positive results, many people prefer to travel by buses

The fact that more than one million commuters have travelled by the Green Line buses in Karachi within a short span of one month indicates the necessity of increasing such rapid collective mobility in the mega city and other metropolises of the country. The mass rapid transportation system should be introduced on other routes of Karachi. The Sindh capital, with its ever-growing population, has long been crying for an efficient rapid mass public transportation system connecting various parts of the sprawling city with one another. The Green Line bus project has broken the long logjam, and hopefully Green Line-like buses would soon be plying other roads of the city. The Orange Line bus project is likely to come on line shortly. With its infrastructure in place, it is expected to start operations in the first quarter of this year. The Green Line and Orange Line projects have been much delayed due to financial constraints in their execution. Work on the former got underway in 2016 and it began functioning from Jan 10. Initially, the project was to be completed in one year at the estimated cost of Rs16.85 billion but the cost jumped to Rs35 billion.

The Green Line buses operate over a 22km route from Surjani Town to Numaish. It won’t take much time to extend the route up to Keamari via Tower. The Green Line project is yielding positive results in that now many people prefer to travel by buses instead of by motorbikes and cars. Gradually the buses would cut the number of bikes on roads, as now too many bikes plying roads are posing dangers to lives and limbs. Bikes have rendered it very difficult for people to walk across roads. Collective mobility is reducing the consumption of petrol and diesel resulting in cutting environmental pollution and with it positively impacting the highly deleterious effects of climate change. At present, transport consumes 25% of energy overwhelmingly composed of fossil fuels. It is for the people of Karachi to jealously guard this mass rapid transportation scheme and other such projects.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 12^th, 2022.

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