Integrated Urban Mobility

Abstract

Habitually, urban mobility involves movement of inhabitants within or among urban areas. As cities continue to grow across the world, the resulting unregulated urban sprawl is associated with numerous adverse consequences. If these growing sub-urban areas and city cores are not adequately and efficiently interconnected by different modes of mass rapid transit systems (MRTS) from origin to destination for last mile connectivity, inhabitants continue to commute fittingly by private modes on consistent basis for their daily activities. This aspect thrusts high level of congestion and increases the commuting cost, collectively contributing to the degradation of urban environment and subsequently low quality of urban living often disengaging the city from its inhabitants. Additionally, with the surge in socio-economic profile of urban areas coupled with ICT (Information and Communication Technology) enabled provision of urban services, the conventional notion of urban mobility is altering swiftly. The MRTS needs to develop inventive structure for the planning, designing as well as implementing mechanisms to offer widely accessible (spatially, socially, all age groups and gender types) choices for sustained urban mobility while gradually unfolding the city to its hurried inhabitants at all the possible levels and scales. In this context, this paper attempts to and assess the current status of MRTS in the provision of last mile connectivity through the case study of Bangalore metropolitan city in India. The analysis intends to articulate the rational configurations for achieving efficient and inclusive urban mobility.