After years of deliberations on metro and monorail projects to ease the traffic congestion in the city, the Chandigarh Administration is currently not keen on pursuing either of the two projects and plans to strengthen the existing public transport system here.
With the experts raising apprehensions on the financial viability of multi-million metro and monorail projects in Chandigarh, it is now highly unlikely that either of the two will now be taken up in the near future.
The UT Administration has now turned its focus on strengthening the public transport system and is all set to procure 40 electric buses. Besides, a policy on “carpooling” and another on “parking” will be implemented in the city.
The Administration is also pushing for signing a Reciprocal Transport Agreement with the neighboring states of Punjab and Haryana.
“Given the current population of the city, both the metro and monorail projects are not financially viable. These are long-term projects and might be taken up after a decade or more,” said a senior officer of the UT Administration while talking to The Pioneer.
He said that the Administration has planned to increase the bus services and strengthen the existing public transport system here. In this series, we have planned to hire 40 electric buses including bus charging stations and have recently refloated the tender for this. Electric bus fleet will be introduced to reduce the pollution levels also, the officer said.
The routes for plying the electric buses have been identified and these will run on per kilometre basis, the senior bureaucrat added.
The kilometre scheme entails hiring of private buses by government or administration for plying on certain identified routes with driver of the private party and the conductor will be the government or administration employee. The cost of each electric bus is estimated between Rs 1.20 cr to Rs 1.50 crore.
The UT officer said, “Also, the CTU mobile app will be updated to make it more informative and user-friendly.”
Notably, in a meeting held with senior officers of Punjab and Haryana recently, the Chandigarh Administration had discussed the issue of traffic congestion and apprized the two neighboring states about the current status of metro and monorail projects. The UT Administration had proposed preparing a holistic plan for regional mobility keeping in view all the aspects of urban planning, transport, engineering feasibility and the common policy denominator.
Now, the newly-constituted Chandigarh Administrator’s Advisory Council will also take up the issue of traffic congestion in its first meeting likely to be held in September.
The UT officer further said, “The Administration is pushing for signing a Reciprocal Transport Agreement with the states of Punjab and Haryana to regulate, co-ordinate and control the operation of buses on inter-state routes. At present, the Administration is losing a lot of money in the absence of a Reciprocal Transport Agreement.”
“A common transport corporation namely Greater Chandigarh Transport Corporation is also proposed to be constituted after identifying the feasibility of all the three governments,” he added.
Earlier, a memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed in 2015 by the Governments of Haryana, Punjab and Chandigarh for the formation of Greater Chandigarh Transport Corporation (GCTC) for implementation of tricity metro project. The metro project costing more than Rs 13000 crore had proposed to link Chandigarh with satellite townships of Panchkula and Mohali and under this, a total of 37.573 km metro rail project was proposed.