Green light for New Delhi metro

indiamike

NEW DELHI, India --Commuters in New Delhi frustrated by interminable traffic jams and soaring levels of road rage have received a belated Christmas present -- a new underground rail system.

Stage one of the new New Delhi metro was officially opened Tuesday, Christmas Eve, by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who was also given the honor of buying the system's first ticket.

The plan is eventually to lay some 240 kilometers (150 miles) of track, although the first stretch of the network to become operational runs for just over eight kilometers.

The first section will be open to the public from Thursday.

New Delhi is only the second Indian city to receive a metro rail system, although the capital's network is considerably more high-tech than the one in the eastern city of Kolkata, formerly Calcutta.

The trains used on the network, built by a Japanese-Korean consortium, are comparable with those used on the world's most advanced metro systems.

Initially around 60 train sets will be imported for the system, with a further 180 sets to be built in India itself.

With its sparking stations and sleek trains, officials say the new system will be more advanced than the Tokyo or New York subways and on a par with those of Singapore and Hong Kong.

Long time coming
The original idea of constructing an underground railway in the Indian capital was first mooted over 50 years ago, but the project became mired in decades of bureaucratic wrangling.

In 1998 the project was finally given the go-ahead with stage one, consisting of some 62 kilometers of track connecting downtown New Delhi, scheduled for completion by 2005.

In total the first phase has a projected cost of $1.7 billion.

The system is seen as New Delhi biggest hope for easing the city's mammoth congestion problems and clearing the air in one of the world's most polluted cities.

Some four million vehicles, ranging from jam-packed buses to slow-moving bullock carts, cram the city's streets with thousands of new vehicles joining them every month.

Just one car breaking down on a key thoroughfare can cause gridlock for several hours.

Planners estimate that the first phase of the project will carry around two million commuters a day with trains running every three minutes.

reprinted from www.cnn.com

Midnite Toker

Well, I'm in Delhi now and can report that the Metro is up and running from today.

It isn't quite the magic bullet for traffic congestion the politicians and spin doctors would like everyone to believe, as traffic congestion on the surface needs to be addressed in parallel with the demand for mass-transit. In fact the whole thing seems to have become something of a political football with the Vajpayee Govt. claiming amazing increases in property values along the way (guess who bought up swathes of land along the Metro route....?) and regeneration of shopping in Connaught Place.

Calcutta, which is the city compared with Delhi when the Metro system is talked about, apparently has total traffic chaos today, not what was predicted when their Metro was introduced.

Most amusing notice for intending passengers on the Delhi metro:

"Travelling on the roof is not permitted"

A sad fact to record is the loss of much of the remaining green area in Connaught Circle for the station there (opening in possibly three years). I can remember sitting in there twenty years back, watching the boys bringing goats in to browse on the shrubs and trees.

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