The announcement of a comprehensive online passenger information system by the Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC) comes as a relief for Chennai’s commuters. This information system promises to provide details of the routes, timings and bus stops.  A recent article in Hindu -

“The entire programme has been outsourced to Ascenso Telecom Solutions, which has agreed to offer the service free of cost in exchange for advertising rights…A senior MTC official told The Hindu that the proposed helpline would function like a call centre. Information about bus stops along a particular route number, origin and destination, journey time, fare details, and expected time of arrival at a particular bus stop will be available through the service.”

Every time Transparent Chennai’s team members set out  to collect complete bus routes information using GPS units, different sources told them about MTC’s plan to establish this information system. Transparent Chennai was advised to not replicate something that was going to be out in the near future. However, we still went ahead hoping that this exercise would highlight the urgent need for this kind of information and push the authorities to make it accessible. We managed to collect complete (each stop) information for 70 bus routes. We also repackaged MTC data so that commuters could view them on maps.

Image: Transparent Chennai’s Bus Routes Layer

As expected, this is the most celebrated feature of our website. Months or probably years have passed and MTC has still not activated its information system. Transparent Chennai hopes that this time the announcement is for real. Till then commuters can come to our website and access our bus routes information!

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Somya Sethuraman

It has been a while since I last blogged. I could not find an appropriate topic to blog about. Moreover, the team has been blogging regularly about latest events and updates, so I waited till I was adequately inspired to put down my thoughts in words. Today seems to be the day. As I sit at home enjoying the long weekend, I can’t help but think about Transparent Chennai, and the team’s dream to make it a citizens-led platform. Each and every member of our team has an aspiration for this polluted and crowded yet strikingly beautiful city of Chennai. After the successful launch of our website, our aspirations and dreams look slightly more realistic and achievable. By asking our users to contribute, we have moved one step closer to our dream. There is this one thought that keeps the team going – ‘What if Transparent Chennai succeeds in its endeavor to empower its citizens?’ While that remains a question to be answered in due time, one might wonder who the real master minds are behind the project.

I would call them the men ‘behind the scenes’. Prabu Raja from the tech team, without whom our mapping project would have been impossible, says “I am very fond of mapping and work towards improving the technology for development. I want to leverage my skills to reach out to the citizens by allowing them to view data on exciting and easy-to-understand maps.” When asked about the city, Prabu tells me, “I hate traffic jams and I feel sad about slum dwellers living close to Cooum who suffer the most when Chennai gets flooded during incessant rains. Chennai in my dreams would be a city where all these issues have been taken care of.” Muthukumaran, who sits right next to Prabu, shares similar thoughts. “I really enjoy working on this project because the very idea that I can reach out to Chennai’s residents through this medium excites me,” says Muthu. “I only hope that people appreciate this project and come forward to join us in this modest effort of ours to change Chennai for the better.” Muthu is the man behind the interesting design of the website which has evolved over time  to become more user-friendly and catchy.

Meryl Mary Sebastian, our longest standing intern, leads a hapless life as she goes around from one zonal office to the other searching for mapable data. She might be the youngest member in our team but don’t you underestimate her skills to gather and organize data. “This project introduced me to ideas of how and what a city could be. I love that we are creating a space for information that will empower and encourage the citizens of Chennai to participate in the planning and shaping of their city,” says our intern. All that she aspires for is a ‘clean and green Chennai!’ Our newest member Vaishnavi Narasimhan has been on a roll ever since she joined the project. When questioned, she gives a curt reply – “I would like to see more trees and less garbage.” Vaishnavi has been traveling to each and every place in the city where one can find heaps of garbage. If you are a resident of Chennai, you would know that her task is practically endless. She also loves chatting up with groups and organizations and has been crucial in getting the project its due publicity.  We have one another Muthu working from home, who is invisible even to the team, but his work speaks for him. Whenever we have a problem of transferring data to the GIS platform, we look towards Muthu for solutions. His data cleaning work involves a lot of patience and time, and the team in its entirety was really happy to meet him during the launch of TC!

There have been 10 more interns for this project from different parts of the world who came and worked with us because they found the project interesting and exciting. All these members are invisible to the citizens we reach out to, but they are undoubtedly the real face of this project. Three cheers to all of you out there. Of course, there is something about this project that brings us all together – this project is about how we can make each and every day of our lives better. The website has massive potential which can be realized when more, and eventually all of us, come together and realize our duty to voice our opinions as informed and empowered residents of Chennai. Imagine- One day all of you MIGHT have enough walking space in Chennai, an excellent public transport which takes you to your destination in no time, a flyover which serves its very purpose, pollution free roads and parks, a clean and hygienic place to pee whenever you feel like and not having to hold it till you reach home, door to door collection of garbage and no mountains of smelly filth strewn around the streets of Chennai! Nobody but you can change this ‘MIGHT’ to ‘WILL’. We have already taken a number of steps towards getting closer to our dream and probably yours as well, but the rest is your responsibility.

Contact us immediately!

Posted by Somya Sethuraman

“Why do car owners expect the city to make room for them to park their private property? Parking is not a legal right.”
“Chennai city’s car owners form a minority, yet they possess maximum political power, enough to influence Chennai’s transport plans.”
“The poor agitate, while the rich operate.”

With these and other provocative thoughts, Enrique Penalosa, the former mayor of Bogota who visited Chennai recently, turned our prejudices towards auto owners on their heads!1 Penalosa during his talk at Anna University, Chennai in November 2009 that I happened to attend, discussed the possible transformation of Chennai’s transport system into one that is friendly to the city’s environment and its citizens. Chennai has recently seen an explosion of plans for transport projects focusing on high speed transport corridors, bridges and flyovers and a planned metro rail2. Penalosa argued that while infrastructure projects such as these sometimes contribute towards smooth flow of traffic in the short run, these alone cannot be the long term solution to traffic management within the city. More flyovers and roads make it easier to ride and harder to walk, and eventually lead to increased motor vehicle ownership, which again requires ever greater numbers of flyovers and roads. Clearly, with the limited space and capacity in the city, and the increasing pressures on the environment from cars, this vicious circle cannot be a sustainable solution.

Penalosa said that such projects do not make sense when you look at statistics. Chennai’s numbers prove this: in a group of 100 residents, 38 travel by bus, 4 by train, 30 walk, 14 travel by cycle, 7 travel by two-wheeler, and 5 by other modes. Only 2 out of a hundred travel by car! Building more flyovers to accommodate the small percentage of car users and building a metro rail which not many can afford are clear cut cases of social exclusion. The result of this over-emphasis on flyovers and highways and negligence with respect to walkers has had adverse implications – Forty two percent of road accidents in Chennai involve pedestrians and ten per cent of them involve cyclists. However, Penalosa argued that this bias towards automobiles is not just a problem of the government – we, the citizens, need to stop viewing automobile ownership as being closely linked to high social status.

Penalosa offered some interesting policy prescriptions to decrease private car use: Strengthen the public transport system and make the usage of cars more expensive through taxes on cars and parking, so that revenues from this can be used to subsidize public transport. But not just any kind of public transport: Penalosa advocated for the cheapest and easiest form of public transport — buses.

Penalosa does seem to have a valid point to make because I just came across a recent study by CSE which stated that it takes 60 cars to carry 90 people, but only one bus!3 Yet, I figured out through data sources that Chennai city has largely ignored its buses. There is acute overcrowding in buses during peak hours. Overcrowding is as high as one hundred and fifty per cent in certain routes as the supply is inadequate. As a result, crowds at the bus stops and spillover on the carriageways has become common. The waiting time at the bus stops has also increased. Meanwhile, private vehicle ownership has skyrocketed. The total number of motor vehicles in CMA has increased from 144,282 in 1984 to 1,674,185 in 2005. The vehicle population has grown at the rate of fifty per cent per annum during this period, owing largely to the growth in two wheelers and cars. The number of two-wheelers has grown even faster – from 87,000 in 1984 to 1,266,114 in 2005, at the rate of about sixty five per cent per annum. The number of motorcars has also increased significantly4.

Transport policy needs to be people-centric. A city with bicycle lanes, pedestrian friendly roads, and an excellent bus network is not only socially inclusive, but also one that is far more environmentally sustainable in the long run. Penalosa’s provocative lecture was a clear indication that the transport authorities need to re-align their policies and strategies in accordance with what the ‘majority’ of the citizens desire.

Contributed by – Somya Sethuraman, a Researcher for the Transparent Chennai team of the Centre for Development Finance, IFMR

1 http://beta.thehindu.com/news/cities/Chennai/article52673.ece
2 http://www.hindu.com/2010/02/28/stories/2010022850220100.htm
3 Footfalls: Obstacle Course to Livable Cities, Right to Clean Air Campaign, 2009, Centre for Science and Environment
4http://jnnurm.nic.in/nurmudweb/toolkit/CDP_CHENNAI.PDF