Pod taxis today, jet packs tomorrow

The personal rapid transit podcar system at Heathrow Airport in London. Pic/X

I have been a huge fan of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) for years now. This isn't because I think it is a particularly competent body, or because I think it knows what it is doing, but because I appreciate its optimism when it comes to thinking up projects that are meant to improve infrastructure in the city. The MMRDA may not understand the concept of execution, but I believe it is the thought that counts, and I appreciate it.

Here's another reason: the MMRDA prompts me to play a lovely guessing game every other year, whenever it announces a fanciful new project. It allocates millions of dollars (the American ones) to these ambitious plans but, when confronted with the results, I am often left trying to guess what the money was used for. Is this all we could get, I ask. It's a lot of fun.

A third reason behind my fondness for this government body is that the MMRDA is largely run by bureaucrats. Not just any bureaucrats, mind you, but IAS officers, whom everyone knows are the most hardworking, efficient officers in India. These folks inspire me because of how they do so much with the little they are given. Look at their salaries, for instance, and how so many of them manage to educate their children at universities in the West on such paltry sums. It's almost as if they know something the rest of us don't, about how to afford a foreign education on a government budget. How do so many of them pull it off, I smile in amazement, while hoping one of them will write a guide for the rest of us.

The reason I bring up my fondness for the MMRDA this week is because of the latest stroke of brilliance on its part. After changing the face of Bombay with world-class projects like the Urban Development Project, Urban Transport Project, incredibly safe skywalks and city-wide Monorail network, tomorrow's potential Nobel prize-winners have turned their attention towards solving a decades-old crisis of transportation at Bandra Kurla Complex.

This may come as a surprise to some readers of this column, but the BKC came into being as a planned business hub in 1977, before this newspaper was born. It slowly grew into a premium office district, attracted five-star hotel chains, high-end real estate companies and, eventually, an Apple store - that branded full stop at the end of every sentence about gentrification.

What it didn't do, in all these decades, is figure out how human beings working at BKC were meant to get to the office and back. The number of buses dwindled, there was nothing done to address errant cab drivers, and millions of Bombayites spent years in a state of misery while commuting to and from some of the city's most expensive buildings. If you stop by that Apple store anytime soon, do it after 5 pm to see how little has changed for those who don't own a vehicle.

Luckily, thanks to those superhuman IAS officers at the MMRDA, a pod taxi project from Heathrow Airport in London has been identified as the solution everyone has been waiting for. It will cover a little over 8 kilometres, apparently, and have 38 stations. Each pod will be 3.5 metres long and zip through BKC at up to 40 kilometres an hour. What this means is, current lines outside bus stops will shift to these pod stops, making everyone happier and generating a lot of photographs for brochures and hoardings over the coming years.

The announcement of this project wasn't met with applause, which surprised me. There were questions raised, by people who study transport, about why a smaller investment on increasing the frequency of buses didn't make more economic sense, or why so much was being spent to transport six people at a time instead of 100. I didn't join in the cacophony of complaints because I knew the MMRDA would do a good job, even if they have yet to do one.

Apparently, the pod taxi system was announced only after a detailed ‘techno-economic feasibility study' was commissioned. Details about this study are few and far between for now, because the chairman of the MMRDA has allegedly been blocking anyone asking questions on X, formerly known as Twitter. I don't blame him though. He's probably hard at work thinking up the next big idea, like jet packs for food delivery workers, or ziplines across the highway. Everything can be solved with a few thousand crores.

When he isn't ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.