A Study on Para-Transit System in Indore City

EMBARQ India has been working with the city of Indore, India since 2008 to improve the quality of city bus services. EMBARQ has provided ongoing technical advice to Atal Indore City Transport Services Ltd. (AICTSL) — the city's public transport authority — on issues including performance monitoring, route planning, bus procurement and the design and implementation of a pilot bus rapid transit (BRT) corridor.

Given that the majority of public transport demand in Indore is currently served by the paratransit system, developing an understanding of the nature of this system was crucial for effective route and system planning of bus services. Existing information on paratransit services in Indore, however, did not look at the system as a whole but rather at specific aspects. We therefore decided to commission our own comprehensive data collection effort. TARU, a consulting firm, was engaged to perform this study. Some ideas we wished to explore in more detail included whether to formalize paratransit services, replace paratransit vehicles, limit the area in which paratransit vehicles can operate or otherwise enforcing the geography of operation and so on.

The resulting report contains a large amount of data on the following topics:

• Paratransit System Characteristics: Routes, coverage, regulations, facilities, traffic levels
• Paratransit Vehicles: Vehicle types, vehicle ages, fuel sources, maintenance procedures
• Paratransit Operators: Costs, revenues, fare structures, driver profiles
• Paratransit Users: Passenger trip details, weekly travel statistics, accessibility, expenditure, socio-economic statistics
• Road Safety: Accidents, safety measures, speed limits, overcrowding

At EMBARQ India, we hope to use this data set in the following ways:

• To capture the extent of unauthorized paratransit services
• To understand the socio-economic profile and transport cost burden of paratransit users
• Use travel activity data (number of trips, kilometers travelled, etc.) in computing a baseline for greenhouse gas emissions and to estimate the impact of moving paratransit users to the bus system on carbon dioxide emissions
• To develop estimates, based on economic and financial analyses, of the equity investments required to formalize existing paratransit systems

We will be releasing working papers around these topics periodically over the course of the following year.

In the meantime, we hope that others interested in paratransit systems will be able to use this rich data set to produce analysis around similar or other issues. We believe the data set we have developed is both wide-ranging and in-depth. We hope you are as excited to use it as we are!

Please find links for the full report below. We are happy to share the raw data, as well. For more information, contact EMBARQ India Director Madhav Pai, mpai@embarqindia.org.