Mumbai Vacation
Indian cities are fast growing in population I mean there are reports that are saying that our Urban population is going to go from 300 million to 700 million by 2030 with this urbanization what comes is motorizing vehicles are increasing at three times the rate of the people it’s a space
Problem now there is just not enough space to accommodate this huge growth in Vehicles Auto has form significant mod shares in most Indian cities Mumbai has about 120,000 Auto Ras about 80 85% of the City’s population really uses the rias regular users of rias are people who can’t or don’t want to compete with the limited supply of public transport
Auto Ras are a very convenient mode of transport to get to places where your other forms of Transport can’t reach even if I have to catch trains or something like that I can just get out of my house take an autoa and reach uh station much faster it allows you to
Travel internally in within a suburb it makes you go to places as soon as possible they are cheaper they are better they are uh they can go anywhere because of their size it’s very easy for them to go into narrow Lanes so they are very important part of day-to-day
Transportation you can hail them you can get get on one immediately they run by the meter I can walk out of my house and go wherever I want to at any time of Day when we talk about reforms in the autoa sector we have to look at the role that auto Ras play in the urban transport system according to the National Urban transport policy Auto have an important role to play and should be thought of as part of an integrated public transport system
You’ll hear a lot of problems about sort of fair haggling and fair negotiations I think most important thing is actually to uh ensure that autoa guys don’t refuse passengers that’s the major problem in Mumbai sometimes when you really need to go to some places they you know bluntly refuse
To go but just because the place is close by and they can find some other passenger who would want to travel further away so the the challenges are multipronged and somebody will have to show leadership to be able to bring about change because the fact remains
That there definitely is a felt need for improvement in autoa services having better access to Auto ricas at Major Transit hubs for example Rail stations improving services so that there are no refusals or overcharging better queuing and there have been some pilot in initiatives that have looked into the
Introduction of GPS devices to enable call Based autoa Services which could have far-reaching effects in improving Services a good example for improvement in the autoa space is what happened in the to the taxi industry in Mumbai they they passed the fleet taxi enactment act bringing in some sort of Fleet
Management Fleet control into the autoa business will truly help extract all the efficiencies all the economies of scale you get from bleet Management the autoa market is growing in size the government is sort of turning its head away from the problems and what it results in sort of bad experiences for the drivers for the commuters and for the environment as a whole recognizing the role that auto rells play in sustainable Urban
Transport and the important role they also play in meeting the daily commute needs will go a long way in improving the conditions for drivers as well as passengers and resting benefits for Indian cities as a whole autoras are shared Vehicles given that their impact on space on the
Environment is much smaller they have a big role to play in sustainable transport so it’s it’s it’s important that they Stay oh
