Mumbai's Public Transportation Case Study

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Introduction
This paper seeks to emphasize the problem of Mumbai’s poor public transport system as an issue to the sustainability of Mumbai, along with evaluating current measures to solve Mumbai’s poor public transportation. Hence,we propose an integrated Bus and Bicycle transit to solve the causes to Mumbai’s poor public transport system.

Sustainability, establishing a link with public transport
A sustainable city is defined as one that produces the maximal amount of output with the least ecological footprint, and one of the most important factors of ecological footprint is its quality of living (Urban21 Conference, 2000). The poor quality of Mumbai’s public transportation encourages its population to rely on private transportation. A trend …show more content…

In our paper, we will determine the performance these measures by checking if they satisfy four important criteria set in this paper. Affordability, ease of expansion, eco-friendliness and service coverage area. Firstly, a public transport system’s fares has to be affordable enough to cater to a city’s masses, especially the poor. Secondly, a public transportation system needs to be easily expandable to cope with a city’s expansion. Thirdly, a public transport system should be as eco-friendly as possible, in order to reduce the carbon footprint of its commuters, thereby improving the cities’ overall outlook in sustainability. Lastly, a system needs to cover a large area to cope with the demands. A lack of public transport option within any area promotes private …show more content…

Firstly, the government provides little to no funding into implementing these bike rental stations. This is because most of the current bicycle-sharing systems in world, for instance in Paris, are operating on a Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) scheme with large advertising firms such as JCDecaux (Midgley, 2011). Local companies in Mumbai would pay to place advertising space by paying to build and maintain the bicycle rental system. This would solve the issue of inadequate funding.

Secondly, using a bicycle is convenient, cheap, produces no carbon emissions and can access to more places that are not possible with automobiles, as directly highlighted by Midgley (2011). As such, this meets the criteria of affordability, eco-friendliness and large coverage area.

Thirdly, our bicycle rental system is automated and requires minimal manpower. Docking stations can be fully automated and rental and return is done through the use of ticketing machines (Midgley, 2011). Hence a bicycle sharing system eliminate the issue of poor management of staff since the reliance of manpower is

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