India’s urban transport is gridlocked and inefficient. Open data and open networks could revolutionise mobility, efficiency, and commuter convenience in cities.
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A recent challenge that has risen to the top of the urban delinquency ladder and staring at the larger Indian cities in the face is the challenge of mobility. The Indian urban mobility scenario is deeply flawed and appears to be worsening. Roads are congested with cars; traffic jams repeatedly threaten to turn into gridlocks; the air is poised to become more polluted, road crashes are on the rise, and road fatalities are mounting. The situation is impacting cities’ overall economic output. Recent reports indicate that cities’ contribution to the national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has plateaued and remains stagnant at 62 percent. The question facing such cities is how city mobility can become faster, safer, and favourable, despite these cities becoming denser and even more chaotic.
In this scenario, the adoption of open data and open networks can help resolve some of the mobility challenges. As the word ‘open’ suggests, these are data and networks that can be used freely, reused, and redistributed by anyone in the transport sector. Universal access and universal transparency are the hallmarks of this concept. They play a significant role in driving innovation and in enhancing service quality, efficiency, and commuter convenience in the area of urban mobility. Open data can provide real-time transit information, area-specific details on traffic congestion, and an inventory of infrastructure along the way, as well as commuter usage patterns.
Open networks can enable seamless integration across different transport modes and service providers.
On the other hand, open networks can enable seamless integration across different transport modes and service providers. Since data is generated at various locations, including homes, offices, roads, and public spaces, the framework must reach the nooks and crannies of cities to capture this data and create value once it is processed. However, data collection, standardisation, and streaming are an intricate exercise that requires a great degree of expertise.
Allied with the concept above is the optimal use of paratransit mobility services, such as taxis, autorickshaws, and bike-taxis. This is especially true for peri-urban areas, as well as for cities and towns that lack public transportation or have an inadequate number of buses. It is a fact that public transportation in Indian cities is available in only a handful of them. Of the approximately 60 metropolitan cities, about 100 cities with a population of half a million or more, and about 450 towns with a population of 100,000, only 127 cities have some form of bus transportation. The total number of urban buses nationwide is around 46,000, serving an estimated urban population of 540 million, with about 80 percent concentrated in the top eight cities. About 19 cities have metro-rail services. Others depend exclusively on personal transport or paratransit, although more cities are considering adopting metro rail, metro lite, and metro neo.
The absence of public transportation in the majority of Indian cities thus presents an opportunity for private players to contribute without being constrained by a lack of governmental support.
Fortunately, since the utility of open data and open networks is equally applicable to these cities, paratransit modes must be considered for integration into any open network platform. Such technological support could enhance commuter convenience in many urban areas and improve paratransit mobility. Their use is likely to increase significantly, reducing the need for private transportation. However, one must bear in mind that these urban settlements may not have worthwhile data. The proliferation of newer forms of data and technology, combined with the now-universal use of cell phones, creates opportunities to produce both new services and transport data. The role of private actors and companies is highly desirable, and partnerships among private service providers and data collectors could be funded from the revenue generated through enhanced and improved services available on a unified platform. It would also give them opportunities to take, for instance, an entire district and standardise processes across cities, extending the unified platform. The absence of public transportation in the majority of Indian cities thus presents an opportunity for private players to contribute without being constrained by a lack of governmental support.
The participation of city administrations in areas of open data and open networks could be central, particularly in instances where cities operate bus services and continuously collect a wide variety of data. Unfortunately, ‘urban’ in India is constitutionally a state subject, and urban transport, therefore, falls within the realm of state governments. However, some state statutes have allowed cities to establish bus transport undertakings to handle public transportation. Schedule 12 of the Indian Constitution, which lists municipal functions, does not mention transport. Therefore, while transport technology interventions would call for standardised data formats across cities, the prevailing situation yields a bewildering variety of local structures.
Never before have such a plethora of tools existed to build initiatives and create or harness growing quantities of data to fill these gaps.
Furthermore, most cities also face a critical fragmentation of authority that spills over to the area of transport. As a consequence, a combination of urban local bodies (ULBs), state parastatals and government departments is involved in urban transport, each handling specific aspects of it. This situation obviously breeds multiplicity of policies, data ownership, and data standards. This scenario will, therefore, require city-specific customisation and extensive liaising.
One alternative is for cities to lead in standardising processes across organisations and create a unified platform that can be made available to citizens. However, this is difficult in most cases, as cities are financially fragile. Most cities, as a result, would struggle to make any worthwhile investments in transportation or in transportation technology applications. Neither is in-house expertise available for managing and curating open data systems. Thus, the private players would have to assume the primary role and arrive at an arrangement through which their investment could also have a decent rate of return.
However, this itself runs into problems. It is known that in many Indian cities, fundamental urban transport data, such as information on routes and stops, may be missing, creating difficulties in the initial stages, since no real transport planning can be done in Indian cities or effective public transport service provision, including coordination between transport networks.
Open data and open networks, to function optimally, require the state to step in with a law that compels the free sharing of data collected from people for their use.
The digital revolution presents an opportunity to address this problem. Never before have such a plethora of tools existed to build initiatives and create or harness growing quantities of data to fill these gaps. The spread of new forms of data and technology, including the rapid expansion of cell phone use, presents opportunities to create new services and fill in missing public transportation data. Additionally, improved technology and economies of scale mean that it now costs less to capture, store, and process data than earlier.
Private sector actors, such as Google, Uber, Ola, and Chalo, are increasingly collecting large quantities of data and offering various transport and associated information services. However, in many of these private sector efforts, data and the tools and knowledge to use this data effectively within the transport sector are valuable commodities that are often sold at high prices. Additionally, the collection of data from users, including through location-based apps, raises serious privacy concerns. Open data and open networks, to function optimally, require the state to step in with a law that compels the free sharing of data collected from people for their use.
Ramanath Jha is a Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation.
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Dr. Ramanath Jha is Distinguished Fellow at Observer Research Foundation, Mumbai. He works on urbanisation — urban sustainability, urban governance and urban planning. Dr. Jha belongs ...
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