Mass transit for Karachi

Karachi is the world’s seventh-largest metropolis with an estimated population of nearly 21 million inhabitants packed in an area of 310 square miles, making it the tenth densest large city in the world. And it is by decades overdue for a mass-transit system. Hitherto such projects have had a chequered history, with the Karachi Circular Railway being a tale of serial incompetence — and now it is the turn of the bus. Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) are the buzzwords in the global mass-transit community, and BRT guru Enrique Penalosa has been in the city at the invitation of the Asian Development Bank, among others. Mr Penalosa is no mere mouthpiece, he has an enviable track record in terms of public transport systems as a past mayor of Bogota in Colombia where he built a system which opened in 2000 and today carries 1.4 million passengers a day.

There seems to be little dispute or doubt that BRT is the road to go, but how Karachi gets there is very much a matter for debate. The city has been divided into colour-coded ‘lines’ which were first set out in a plan devised by the Japanese in 2010. In principle, there is nothing wrong with this; the problem lies in the fact that there are at least four large players looking to develop the BRT system and they are not all on the same page.

Whilst there may need to be several developers, they all need to operate under a single entity that has a single corporate image, a single ticketing and pricing system and a single ‘look’ as Mr Penalosa has very rightly pointed out. This is the view of virtually every consultant who has looked into the matter, yet the city managers have yet to grasp the necessity of creating such an entity and have green-lighted a diversity of competing players who may have little vested interest in working cooperatively, or from a jointly owned playbook. There is the real prospect of this vital project falling into disarray. A lack of political competencies seems to have once again got in the way of essential development — and Karachi deserves better than this.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 24^th, 2015.

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