Tunnel roads defy logic

Deputy Chief Minister Mr DK Shivakumar doesn’t seem to be in a mood to resile from his intention to dig under-road tunnels to ease the traffic congestion in Bengaluru despite strident opposition from parties in the opposition and objections raised by civil society organisations. While the stated intention of decongesting the traffic arteries may be a legitimate one, the project raises serious doubts about its ability to fulfil the objective of decongesting the clogged traffic arteries and providing the commuting public any relief.

The project is being opposed primarily because it privileges the car users who constitute only 2.3 percent of daily commuters while the cost of it will have to be potentially borne by every single individual living in the city for several years to come by way of taxes. Making the city car-centric at a time is illogical when most metropolitan cities across the developed world are ditching cars mainly due to their inefficiency in terms of number of users per vehicle and their occupancy of the mobile space.

This inefficiency demands moving away from cars—and for that matter from all private vehicles—to mass transport. Bengaluru has a population of 1.4 crore with 1.2 crore vehicles. Looking at this growth, the possibility of a vehicle for each individual is just around the horizon. Contrast this with Singapore which has 57 lakh people with 6.24 lakh cars and Tokyo with 4 crore inhabitants and only 30 lakh private vehicles.

This should explain why nearly four crore commuters take a daily ride on Tokyo’s metro network while the Namma Metro has only a six lakh daily ridership. It is useful to remember that incentivising private vehicles will only undermine the use of mass transport. Further more, while only 36 per cent of Bengaluru people use public transport daily, in Singapore, London and Tokyo, this proportion goes up to 75 per cent.

Convinced of the deleterious impact of explosion of private vehicles, Singapore cancelled its proposal to dig a tunnel down its terrain in 2017. Cities risk considerable disfigurement if infrastructure projects are taken up in settled habitation. No wonder if entry and exit points for the under-road tunnel themselves would be a potential choke-point for the city’s already messy traffic.

Several studies have highlighted the inefficiency of double-decker and tunnel roads vis-à-vis Mass Rapid Transport Systems (MRTS). While tunnel roads have a capacity of only 1,800 as per the data of ‘Passengers Per Hour Per Direction’ (PPHPD), a metro carries 69,000 commuters and a suburban rail 89,000.

Tunnel roads also cost prohibitively. Constructing a tunnel road costs Rs. 1,000 crore a kilometer. While the Metro’s average cost per km (for elevated as well as underground) is Rs. 500 crore, sub urban rail costs Rs. 110 crore per km. The cost of the first phase—Hebbal to Silk Board—of a 43 km tunnel project is being projected at Rs. 43,000 crore.

It is quite understandable why politicians opt for projects involving huge amount of civil work. This as pect remaining unexpressed, it is for aware citizens to logically debate the pros and cons of under-road tunnels that defy efficiency logic.