Is Public Transport Spatially and Temporally Equitable? A case-study in South-East Bangalore∗ Navitha Parthasarathy Sachit Rao International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, India navitha.p;[email protected] Abstract The need to develop equitable public transport in cities, while balancing contradictory demands, has been well recognized. In this paper, this issue is addressed by analysing the frequency and distribution of buses and bus stops, as provided by the state government-owned Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC), in the south-eastern fringe of Bangalore, India. This region of Bangalore is selected as it contains a mix of residential and industrial units and hence, diverse measures of equity can be determined. With this approach, first, bus stops that are between 1-3 kilometers from an arterial road are identified; BMTC data reveals that arterial roads in Bangalore are serviced at a very high frequency by buses. Second, the frequency with which buses service these stops are determined and then grouped according to the time of day - early morning, afternoon, etc. Using these results and data from government surveys, the concepts of availability and accessibility - which form measures of evaluating equity - are tested. In addition to these measures, the results can also be used to determine the impact on pollution - which may occur with the increased use of private vehicles - and on employment and other economic opportunities. 1 Introduction Litman [Lit02] categorises the various types of transport equity, how they overlap, and their impacts on designing transport policies. In the context of this paper, the category entitled \vertical equity with regard to income and social class" is appropriate, as the focus is on analysing the availability of public transport in a region of the south Indian city of Bangalore, which straddles two taluks (or sub-districts) - Anekal and Bangalore South - and hosts industries, both formal and informal, as well as residents with varying wage levels [Gov18]. BMTC is the sole public bus transport operator for the city of Bangalore with upwards of over 6000 daily scheduled buses and close to 70,000 trips1. The report by CSTEP [CST15] presents a population density map of the Bangalore region superimposed on the BMTC network and recommends that it is for the low density regions, This∗ work was supported by Karnataka Innovation & Technology Society, Dept. of IT, BT and S & T, Govt. of Karnataka vide GO No. ITD 76 ADM 2017, Bengaluru; Dated 28.02.2018. Copyright c 2020 by the paper's authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). 1https://www.mybmtc.karnataka.gov.in/info-1/BMTC+Glance/en which are in the suburban parts of the city, that the public bus service is suited. The area of study selected in this paper is one such region that lies in the south-east part of the city. The report [CST15] also presents various scenarios, which consider the Bangalore Metro Rail network and an estimated population increase, and the investments that have to be made by BMTC for each scenario such that it can cater to atleast 30% of passenger trips. It is clear from this report that the bus service provided by BMTC will continue to remain crucial, and in one scenario, will prove to be the \backbone of public transport services". Consequently, the analysis presented in this paper, of public transport in suburban regions, can be used to make the service more vertically equitable. Vasudevan et al. [VMB+14] present the reforms undertaken by the BMTC to improve its service quality. They describe the evolution of the \BIG Bus" system, which is based on a direction-oriented network model rather than a destination-oriented model. In the new model, buses are scheduled to ply at high frequency on the major arterial roads of Bangalore, along with supplementary feeder buses operating at an even higher frequency, which would connect suburban regions in the vicinity of these arterial roads. This model was piloted on Hosur Road - which lies in the area of study considered in this paper - and later extended to other arterial roads. Another innovation adopted by the BMTC, in the context of vertical equity, is the introduction of the Atal Sarige bus system, which has been developed for the urban poor to reach their destinations. Shastry and Bhatt [SB13] present a detailed analysis of the Atal Sarige buses and whether it is indeed accessible to the urban poor. Their analysis reveals that 1) the frequency of these buses is low, as there are few buses and routes; 2) less than 20% of the urban slums, whose residents this system is meant to serve, have a bus stop serviced by these buses that are less than 400 metres; and 3) users would need to often use a regular bus, which is more expensive, to access the Atal Sarige bus network. Equity in public transport, and the city of Bangalore in particular, has received considerable attention in the literature. Baindur and Rao [BR16] analyse the effect of fare increase in travel patterns amongst the economically weaker residents of the city. They consider a centrally located region in the city - hence well connected by buses - which houses residents as well as businesses that hire support staff, both of whom lie in the low-income to lower middle-income groups. The dissertation of Chava [Cha16] focuses on an industrial area within Bangalore city and the possible gentrification in such areas, as well as exclusion from public transport, caused by \transit oriented developments", which includes both the Bangalore Metro Rail and the BMTC system. Pangotra and Sharma [PS06] focus on the role of public transport in limiting the number of private vehicles in Bangalore. They present numerous models, that consider population and income growth as well as the introduction of the Metro Rail and an upgraded BMTC fleet, and conclude that the BMTC system will continue to play a crucial role; these findings are similar to that presented in [CST15]. Sabapathy et al. [SFS12] study the difference in commuting patterns, using different forms of transport, between employees in the Information Technology sector and a traditional Public Sector Unit, in Bangalore. Their analysis shows that the change in travel patterns increases spatial inequity and recommend that policies that encourage the use of public transport and that are not focussed on improving infrastructure for high-income commuters should be developed. These references highlight the important role played, and also expected to play, by the BMTC system in meeting basic transport needs as well as ensuring that various forms of equity are not grossly violated. With this background, the contributions of this paper aim to answer the primary question of determining how accessible is public transport in suburban regions of the city that consist of both residents as well as places of work? Accessibility is determined by the frequency with which bus stops are serviced. By answering this question, using data that exhibits the spatial and temporal distribution of bus services, the resulting answers may be expected to highlight 1) If commuters, who could be residents or employees of businesses in these regions or both, can use public transport at frequent intervals during the day. This will indicate whether commuters have the ability to choose when they can travel or are they constrained to have a fixed behaviour. 2) The distances commuters would have to travel, say using other modes of transport, to access bus stops that are serviced at greater frequency than those that are in proximity to their residences or places of work. 3) Ease of last-mile connectivity and consequently, if commuters have to rely on private vehicles, thus worsening equity from an environmental perspective. 4) If commuters from low-income groups can live in areas of their choice or are restricted to living near their places of employment. In contrast, the temporal distribution analysis may also indicate if commuters with high incomes would be suitably incentivised to choose public transport. The main results of this paper are derived using data provided by the BMTC, such as the time-tables published on their website and GPS traces of buses that operate in the selected region of study; the latter is made exclusively available to the host institution of the authors by BMTC. The paper is organised as follows: In Sec. 2, the methodology that is followed to determine the spatial and temporal distribution is described. In Sec. 3, the results and analysis of these results are presented. Finally, concluding remarks and future directions are outlined in Sec. 4. 2 Methodology The area of study that is selected lies in the south-eastern suburban region of Bangalore; Bangalore is the capital city of the south Indian state of Karnataka. An arterial road, called Hosur Road, as it connects Bangalore with the town of Hosur in the neighbouring state of Tamil Nadu, passes through the region. To justify the choice of this region of Bangalore, consider the map, as shown in Fig. 1, which shows bus termini that have more than 50 routes assigned to them. The stop locations are marked using their GPS coordinates and are listed in the bus stop data for the year 2018, as provided by BMTC. Figure 1: Bus termini with more than 50 trips in Bangalore City As can be seen, the south-eastern region has a greater number of high-frequency termini when compared with other regions that are almost at the same distance from the city centre. This spatial distribution also matches the effort of implementing the direction-oriented network model along the arterial roads of the city. A cursory glance at this map may lead to the conclusion that this region will have a high degree of connectivity and hence, a greater measure of equity.