SHIVANI SINGH

Like most visitors to the city, the former transportation commissioner of New York City Janette Sadik-khan was impressed with the Delhi Metro. “Now you need the same kind of investment for streets. Design them for better mobility, which would make it faster for the bus (to move),” she said in an interview to HT last week.

Sadik-khan was speaking from her experience. New York City is known for its extensive subway network. But there are areas not served by the mass transit. So during her six-year tenure, SadikKhan changed NYC’S “mobility playbook” with cycle lanes, reclaimed walking spaces, and the Big Apple’s customised version of the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT).

The cost of building mass rapid transit is exorbitant, so NYC built a “surface metro” by turning its roads into rails and putting buses in the place of coaches, with much less money. The idea of the BRT originated in Brazil’s Curitiba in the early 70s when the then-mayor Jaime Lerner realised that building a subway was costly and time-consuming. So he gave the bus the functional advantages of the urban rail transit, and the first fast bus lanes launched in 1974 cost 50 times less than the mass rapid transit system, wrote The Guardian.

NYC’S customised Select Bus Service (SBS) had no lowfloor buses or fancy bus stations when it began. Even the fare collection machines were pulled out from the subway and repurposed for the SBS, said Sadik-khan. “Now when people stuck in traffic (in their cars) see a bus pass by, it makes for a compelling proof of the concept,” said the former commissioner.

The SBS, which now runs on 15 routes, has had its share of problems. The recent fund cuts in the public transportation sector have held up expansion plans. While overall bus ridership in NYC has nosedived, SBS routes have done slightly better, said a report by the NYC comptroller, asking for better enforcement and signalling. It also recommended Sbs-type upgrades in every local bus route.

Delhi, which built the BRT in 2008, around the same time