If government honchos are to be trusted, Mumbai will indeed become the first city in India to have a monorail. However I am a little sceptical of the 2010 start date for the service.

The routes are

The estimated cost of the project, proposed on four separate routes is Rs 1800 crore. The first route covering 25 km is Malabar Hill- Gopalrao Deshmukh Marg-Haji Ali-Keshavrao Khade Marg-Jacob Circle-Sane Guruji Marg- S S Rao Marg-Dattaram Lad Marg-GD Ambedkar Marg-Wadala Marg-Wadala Truck Terminus-Antop Hill-Sion Hospital-Dharavi- Bandra Kurla Complex.

The second route is of 10 km is Chembur-Mahul-Gidwani Marg-Gowandi-Chembur. The Lokhandwala Complex-Oshiwara- Jogeshwari-Vikhroli Link Road-Kanjur Marg (10 km) is the third route and Thane-Kalyan-Bhiwandi is fourth route (25 km).

“Monorail is very ideal for Mumbai’s congested areas as it will run on elevated tracks and the space consumed is just 8 to 10 km,” a senior transport planner from MMRDA, K Vijaya Lakshmi said. [link]

The capacity of the Monorail is more than 500 with four coaches attached and more than 700 with six coaches attached to it, she said.

A lot of planning and design needs to be done so that the monorail do not create localised problems. Points of entry, exit, commercial activities leading to them, etc will be the problem areas affecting the users once the monorail is launched.

Hopefully we will see stellar results.

What are your opinions on the routes though? Hopefully the routes will intersect with the train lines on W. Rly and C. Rly. Only then will it become a comprehensive mass transit network. Otherwise it will be more of the same chaos.

I remain a Mumbai train loyalist. Not only is the Mumbai Metropolitan Railway, the fastest way to get from Point A to Point B in Mumbai, it also gives you a slice of what I think of as ‘the real Mumbai life’. Frantic students cramming in seat-huddles tell you that the board examinations are around the corner. A bling-ey group chatters away about the wedding they’re off to in the matrimony season. Office-goers - peons, sales executives, doctors, journalists run shoulders (okay, bodies) in the nau-dabbon-ki-jalad-lowkulll.

And speaking of dabbas, how about the other dabbas? The ones carrying piping hot nourishment, lovingly made by mothers and wives and cooks across the city and delivered Just In Time for lunch to their hungry patrons? To the uninitiated, the dabbawallas are a network of deliverymen who carry lunchboxes from homes to offices and back using a never-fail above-world-class system of colour coding. An Ivy League US b-school used them as a case study and the concept has picked up much visibility since then.
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As all my friends move into matrimony and kid-bearing and generally ’settling down’, they acquire the other trappings of yuppies - investments! One of my friends thinks that real estate is the best option. So I accompanied her on a ‘window-shopping’ spree, scouting the city for the perfect place of land that she could call her own.

We ended up at Vasai Road. Yes, it has a station of its own on the Western line. What’s more, with the number of overhead bridges with twists and turns and forks, I thought we might have landed up in some future version of Mumbai without the crowds.

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This post actually started out as a draft for the ‘7 series’ on Mumbai Metroblogging. It didn’t make the deadline then. Considering that Mumbai trains are in the news again, I think it is worth an airing anyway.

I’m relying on the fact that most of us in this city, live on little oases or islands of our own madness and know very little about the rest of the place. And for outsiders, the beehive is positively mind-boggling anyway. So here’s a special edition of how-to-survive Mumbai by a thoroughbred Mumbaiker.

I always think of the railway network as the central nervous system of this city. It is fairly impossible to get lost in this city. The minute you find yourself out of sorts, you just make your way to the nearest railway station and voila! You’re back on the Mumbai lifeline.
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For the millions who travel by local trains everyday, its an adventure. However so ingrained is the local train into the psyche of the Bombayite that we just take what is dished out as granted and move on. However, citizens from Virar to Borivili have had enough and are taking a new route to get their issues addressed.

Commuters between Virar and Borivli are chalking out alternative plans to reach their workplace on Monday as train services in the section is likely to be disrupted owing to a protest by the Democratic Youth Federation of India.

The youth wing of the CPM has called a rail protest on December 10, which is incidentally the Human Rights Day, to protest against the plight of train commuters on the Virar belt. The agitators, including various residential associations, will request commuters not to board trains on the Western Railway section between 6 am to 6 pm.

The agitators are demanding better frequency of trains to Virar, that is, instead of a 15-minute gap, there should be a Virar train every five minutes. [link]

In light of the Human Rights Day, this week is packed with such activities. Its “Chakka Jaam” today and “Batti Bandh” on Dec 15.

More power to the people.

You know what it’s like to wake up in the morning to a blaring alarm and you wonder what sort of perversion in the human mind permitted the invention of such a torturous experience? Till you remember that you set the alarm.

You know what it’s like to bounce out of bed in feigned energy in an attempt to ‘kickstart’ the day and start your yoga to muscles so stiff, they may as well wrap you in plasti-shield and hang you up to display in the butchers’ market?

You know what it’s like to run out of your bath and discover you are 5 minutes late? 5 minutes!! Do you know what 5 minutes look like? I’ll tell you….
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I’m curious. Is this really possible? While I have great respect for alternative medicine, as far as I know, we don’t have a real cure for AIDS as yet. What do you know…I just stumbled onto the latest promise to come out of the Island of Dreams!

The board says,
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Do you see mud and sludge?

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One little corner in the newspaper tells of a tussle between women commuters and the Mumbai railway authorities. Apparently as a part of a new range of services on Mumbai’s Harbour line, the earlier timetable has been altered. The hitherto 9:14 a.m. Vashi-CST local was advanced by one minute. Not as big a deal…what’s in a minute? (Pah, ask a regular train commuter but we won’t get into that now). The big deal was that three rear compartments that were earlier reserved for women were scrapped.

The unforeseen response to this change was that the women commuters rallied together in protest. First they complained to the Central Railway authorities and then, receiving no response, acted in the most effective way possible. They just wouldn’t let the men get into the compartment.
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I came across an article in Rediff that critiques the new domestic airport at Santacruz. The Delhi based author raises some valid points but then goes completely overboard and mixes two completely different issues and tries to support one with the help of the other. I feel he has some axe to grind with the city and cannot find the proper forum to vent his frustrations.

This is the paragraph I find offending, and out of context

In its edgy, manic way, Mumbai prided itself on being the more organised of Indian cities, devoted to the work ethic, the go-getting glamour capital of the country. This is no longer true. It is now more ramshackle than Kolkata, more inefficient than Delhi and, probably, neither as rich nor as inventive as Bangalore or Hyderabad. Its cosmopolitan ethos and egalitarian energy has been hobbled by provincial-minded politicians, sectarian ideology and pick-pocket capitalism. Every monsoon the city shudders and shuts down and its inhabitants hope it won’t be as awful as last year.

And here is the actual article.

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