Page 50 - TrafficInfraTech Magazine - Linking People Places & Progres

SMART CITIES

Smart Cities:
Replanning and

Rethinking Mobility strategies

These pandemic days are posing challenges to Smart Cities too. Traffic
levels and mobility patterns can alter, as digital transformation takes hold.
What are the challenges? We have here the views of Raj Cherubal, CEO,
Chennai Smart City and Sameer Bhatnagar, Partner- Transport& Logistics,

KPMG, India

“ ontrary to what may be
expected in the era of
social distancing, it is
a good opportunity to
Caggressively transform
public transport especially buses, metro
rail, train, but also drastically expand
infrastructure for, cycling, e-bikes, etc.
Even in pre-pandemic times, a small
percentage of citizens owned cars yet
they disproportionately occupied road
space - cause the terrible congestion,
pollution and chaos on Indian streets.
Our streets are choked with private
vehicles. So rest of the population
owning private vehicles for distancing
is not a practical model,” says Cherubal.
“So walking, public bike sharing,
cycling, including last mile vehicles
can help immensely. But to bring
down the congestion and move more
people with distancing, we need to
aggressively deploy buses and other
mass transit. Even earlier our cities
had inadequate number of buses.
Alternate financing models like value
capture, PPP, separation of subsidies
from measuring efficiency of public
transport corporations etc need to be
implemented to fund this.

50 April-May 2020 / TrafficInfraTech www.trafficinfratech-com-500653.hostingersite.com