Of doors & deaths

Mumbai train network won’t improve with patchwork solutions. Commuters need more trains

June 26, 2019 was an unusual day for Mumbai’s trainspotters. Nobody died on the city’s suburban railway network that day. In a transport system that has claimed over 51,000 lives over 20 years – averaging seven a day – death does not shock easily. But it did on Monday, when four passengers died after falling off two passing trains. Details are still emerging, but it seems both trains were bursting at the seams with passengers, which is not unusual at 9.10am, Mumbai’s rush hour. People were hanging out of doors with barely a toehold. As the trains passed 6.5ft apart at Mumbra, the backpacks of some passengers probably collided, throwing eight on the ballast-covered ground. Even railway officials have termed it an “unheard of incident in the history of Mumbai’s suburban system”, and promised change. 

The plan is to have automatic doors on all new non-AC coaches, and retrofit old coaches with such doors. However, a prototype won’t be ready until Nov. After that, around 3,400 coaches will need retrofitting. Railways’ Jan 2026 timeline seems ambitious, but say they do it, that still leaves eight months. Last year, 570 passengers died after falling off Mumbai locals – at that rate, there could be 380 more such deaths. There’s a bigger issue. Over 350 passengers are packed in each coach during rush hour – what about risks of suffocation when doors are shut? 

Closing coaches, or reducing seats – which railways did in 2015 – does not address the root of the problem, which is that Mumbai does not have enough trains and buses to move its people. Its costly metro is underperforming – as late as Feb this year the fully operational metro lines were running at 33% capacity. The newest one was averaging 100 passengers per trip in trains with a capacity of 2,500.  Besides, closed trains won’t save the roughly 1,150 pedestrians who are killed every year while crossing Mumbai’s suburban tracks. A 2015 railway report blamed this on the shortage of overbridges. So, when it comes to suburban transport, Mumbai, and also other metropolises, need a lot more than patchwork. While netas love to talk up pod taxis, monorail and metro, there’s no substitute for commuter trains and buses. The real solution is to invest more in basic urban infra.

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