DTC ridership thrown under the bus as Metro, taxis see surge

The average daily rides on buses run by Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) declined by 33 per cent, from 4.68 million a day in 2012-13 to 3.16 million a day in 2016-17, data released by the Delhi government show.

Over the same five-year period, the average daily Metro rides increased from 1.93 million to 2.76 million, a 10 per cent decline in the use of mass public transit from 6.6 million rides a day to 5.9 million. This figure does not include buses run by Delhi Integrated MultiModal Transit System, or the DIMTS. The steady fall in the number of buses and daily rides coincides with the biggest political change Delhi saw in decades, when the Aam Aadmi Party assumed office after 15 years of Congress rule. The last few years of the Congress government had seen a revival of buses as a means of public transit, which has weakened since 2013.

The shrinking role of mass public transit in Delhi was accompanied by a rise in taxis on the city’s roads, which increased 63 per cent in 2016-17 from 91,000 to 148,000. The number of taxis in Delhi increased by 10-15 per cent annually in previous years. Almost all of this growth was on account of taxi aggregators like Uber and Ola, the estimates of whose number are pegged at 50,000-55,000 in Delhi.

“We have continued to grow exponentially every week in terms of trips taken. The year 2017 saw us reaching the milestone of 500 million trips,” a spokesperson for Uber said in response to an email.

There are about 5,800 public transport buses running in Delhi today — 4,000 are run by DTC and 1,800 by the DIMTS — against a target of 11,000 public buses set by the Delhi High Court for the year 2007. The requirement of buses for rationalisation of public transport would put the ideal bus requirement far above 11,000 for 2017. Further, DTC overestimates the daily rides on its buses, a report by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has found. Commercial goods vehicles, whose number increased 34 per cent in 2015-16 to 280,000, saw the number decline to 230,000 in

2016-17. Further, these vehicles are only the ones registered in Delhi and not in other parts of the National Capital Region (NCR).

The increase in commercial vehicles in the last two years is congruous with record pollution levels in the Capital.

The city’s fleet of private vehicles has shown growth consistently over two decades to 3.1 million cars and 6.7 million two-wheelers among the 10.5 million registered in Delhi.

“A bus occupies only twice the road space taken by a car, but can carry 40 times the number of passengers. More buses means an enormous saving in fuel and reduction in pollution,” the CSE report adds. Though dust, coal, and fly ash contribute the most to particulate matter pollution in the city, vehicular pollution is the “second-largest” and “most consistently contributing source” to particulate matter pollution in winter, a report by the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, has found. While the road length in Delhi increased by about 20 per cent since 2000-01, the number of private vehicles in the city rose by 150 per cent in the same 15-year period. If DTC buses have failed Delhi’s public transport, buses in general, including company buses and school buses, are the only category of vehicles that saw a decrease in numbers over the last decade. The DTC runs three kinds of buses: low-floor AC and non-AC buses and older and smaller ‘standard’ buses, which have been scrapped, affecting the fleet strength. The number of standard buses declined from 2,300 in 2011-12 to a mere 244 in 2016-17. The average daily rides fell from 4.68 million to 3.16 million, courtesy these standard buses, whose daily rides declined from 1.25 million per day in 2011-12 to 0.18 million in 201617. The Delhi government was in the process of procuring 2,000 standard buses to bridge the gap.

The share of buses in Delhi fell to its lowest in 2016-17 at 0.365 per cent. This shows a reducing preference not just for DTC buses, but the reducing preference for buses, coterminous with the rising preference for personal vehicles.