CK2018: Exploring Collaborative Models for Public and On-demand Bus Transport

Editor's Notes

• #2: Welcome everyone! Thank you for taking the time out to attend this session. In today’s workshop, we are going to explore models for collaboration between public and on-demand bus transport for Indian cities. Participants will be divided into teams and will have to work in parallel to answer a few questions. But first let us understand what the opportunity is here.
• #3: Buses - backbone of urban passenger transport in India And over the last decade, public bus agencies have undertaken several interventions to upgrade and improve the network For instance, Mysore (KSTRCs) implementation of ITS and real-time information delivery to customers at bus stops is iconic today Other interventions range from Regular route rationalizations Adding feeder bus systems Interchange terminals Electronic Ticketing Machines and so on. However, there are still many challenges that remain
• #4: This graph illustrates one such challenge – the trend of rising private motor vehicle ownership against the plateauing fleet size of public bus agencies for the whole of India Take note that the vertical axis on the left which corresponds to fleet size of STUs is in thousands, while that on the right corresponding to private vehicles is in millions. Now such a trend has disastrous implications for air quality, congestion and road safety.
• #5: On the other hand, many private players have entered the urban bus transport market in recent years. In 2015 alone, some 13 companies launched demand-responsive bus services in metro cities across India. Many have also shut operations since then. Known as microtransit or on-demand shuttles in the US, such companies have come to be identified as bus aggregators in India, since they emerged fast on the heels of taxi aggregator companies Ola and Uber
• #6: Core features: crowdsource routes based on customer demand with the help of cell phones, allows them to be efficient – that is they only run buses on a route when there is enough demand to fill up the seats. new routes are added when there is a demand for a particular origin-destination pair they aggregate existing buses (more specifically seats in existing buses) and make them available to commuters for booking via the app buses range from12 seaters to 54 seaters providing accessibility to arterials, sub-arterials and even local roads Customer-centric services through the app, allowing Book seats Pay online Track bus in real-time And rate experience
• #7: As of February 2018, six key players continue to operate these 6 cities – Delhi-NCR, Jaipur, Kolkata, Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. Questions of impact remain Shuttl as you can see, is the biggest player in this space, having raised the most funding and also offering 30k seat bookings per day – let’s look a closer look at Shuttl
• #8: In 2017, WRI partnered with Shuttl to conduct an environmental impact study of their business in Delhi-NCR Region. We obtained operations data from them – Fleet, VKT, Bookings – and conducted a survey with their daily users
• #10: Majority shifted from private cars. Next major shift was from the metro. Only 2% shifted from public buses in Delhi-NCR A total of 67% shifted from car based modes (including carpool, shared-taxis, and employee transport – beyond private car and on-demand taxi depicted here) What impact does such a shift have on the environment and congestion?
• #11: In aggregate, the scale of Shuttl’s operations in 2017 has enabled the avoidance of 14,022 tons of CO2 per Year i.e. 70 percent reduction In fact Shuttl produces only 30% of CO2 compared to all the other modes. To give a sense of scale, you’d need 6.5 lakh trees to absorb 14,000 tons in a year
• #12: Also reduces emissions of criteria pollutants by a high margin Shuttl produces only 15 percent of PM2.5 emissions that would have been emitted by vehicles it takes off the road. Similarly, it produces only 32 percent of NOx; 4 percent of CO; 2 percent of VOC; and only 30 percent of CO2 that would have been emitted by vehicles it takes off the road.
• #13: Commanding a fleet that offers a greater number of seats per vehicle (21 seats on average), Shuttl is able to capitalize on the number of passengers they can serve as compared on-road vehicles other than public bus. Due to Shuttl's operations, 4,312 vehicle equivalents are potentially off the road each day. Which is the same as saying that one Shuttl bus displaces approximately 15 cars.
• #14: These estimates suggest that Shuttl (and possibly other bus aggregators) might be good for the environment And is not for everyone, particularly for low-income commuters and non-smartphone users
• #15: Shuttl’s users are educated professionals aged between 19- 40 years (with disposable incomes that enable the purchase of at least 1 motorized vehicles)
• #16: These were results from one impact study of one bus aggregator in one geography. The impact of such models in other cities remains to be seen
• #20: Now, in this room we have different kinds of bus operators, from STUs, transport Companies, to On-demand Bus Aggregators. To be able to cater to rising travel demand while reducing environmental externalities, we need to pool together our resources and knowledge. How can we do this?