Metro Bus Service

Needed? Yes. Sustainable? Not sure

Public transport revolution or a waste of the provincial development budget? This was the question on everyone’s lips as the Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif launched the Metro Bus Service (MBS) in Lahore to much fanfare. With an official budget of a hefty Rs 32 billion, the project has a steep cost to cover. Granted the project was the need of the hour for a mega city like Lahore, it is also being criticised for crippling the existing transport system, flouting environmental or labour regulations, demolishing businesses without adequate compensation and even dividing Lahore in two halves. The project has much to live up to.

While urban planners have agreed that an MBS, or for that matter any project of the same nature that can cater to thousands of commuters on a large scale and daily basis, is the way forward on public transport, there are legitimate questions on if importing the Istanbul MBS system was the best option. Readers may be reminded that the Mayor of Bagota arrived in 2008 to pitch the Bagota model to the Sharifs at their Model Town Secretariat which was said to be less infrastructure intensive and thus much cheaper to put in place.

Questions over where the funding for constructing the MBS came from and the decision to grant a preferential tender to a Turkish company are still being asked. Local transport operators on the MBS route have also been banned; the project fits well the new Punjab government paradigm of subcontracting urban service provision to foreign companies.

With all opposition parties, including the PPP, the PML-Q and PTI up in arms over the “squandering of the provincial budget on one 27-kilometre road”, the Sharifs have paid deaf ear to any objections raised. Such mega projects also require long term financial planning to make them sustainable rather than a liability. Whether the project can return its cost and be sustainable without any specific subsidy is still four and half years away, a timeframe Shahbaz Sharif has given for the project to return profit.

Launched in the lead up to the dissolution of the provincial assemblies, the public will not get a chance to see the impact of the new bus service. It remains to be seen if the MBS wins the PML-N the city of Lahore in the next general elections or, if, as other parties predict, Lahore will come at the cost of the rest of Punjab. However, the current chief minister and the elder Sharif appear quite confident that the project will deliver for the Lahori public – and the PML-N as a consequence.