Multi-model Future of public transport, NITI Aayog led report

New Delhi/Urban Transport News: A recent NITI Aayog-led report, Transforming India’s Mobility, rightly calls for focused policy attention on creating efficient, seamless and convenient public transport to tackle rising pollution and congestion in urban areas. The way forward is to make public transport attractive for urban India, by the holistic design of habitats and transport, intensive and extensive use of data and information technology, better designed public-private partnership agreements, greater allocation of resources and a combination of top-down dissemination of knowledge and know-how and decentralization of decision-making. The report reveals that India’s transport demand has grown by almost eight times since 1980, more than elsewhere in Asia. And, in fast-urbanizing India, transport demand is bound to gather speed going forward. As India is reached to fourth Industrial revolution, where high IT professional need arises at a very high level. At somehow it increases the demand for PUblic transport at a very high level. Most of the developing cities are turning to the developed city also raise the demand of Public transport. Hence the pressing need to plan ahead to better coagulate resources on the ground to provide modern, dependable and holistic public transport. The policy objective needs to be the provision of transport solutions that are clean, convenient and congestion-free. We need Intelligent Transport Systems in the dense urban centers, complete with onboard sensors and road-level detectors, to better monitor and manage traffic in real time. Demand-side measures like smartphone apps would help. The way ahead is for bus and metro rail operators to seamlessly invest and shore up last-mile connectivity. The focus needs to be on intermodal transport infrastructure, and appropriate governance structures to gainfully boost resources for the express need for improved mobility. The point is to design and plan a functionally thriving public transport system with well-defined modes supporting the main network. An integrated multimodal transport network can hugely improve both ease of business and pleasure.