India's first monorail millions in debt

[kamnet]

http://www.business-standard.com/articl ... 297_1.html

Either a politician got a huge pay-off from developers, or India has hired some of the most incompetent administrators put in charge of a capital project. What the numbers break down to is roughly 450 passengers per rush hour generating daily revenue of $1903 against daily operational costs of $37,000 - almost 95% revenue loss a day for the last two years. The system lost nearly $24 million in the last two years with ridership less than 600,000 a year.

To put it into perspective: the Walt Disney World theme park monorail system transports that many passengers in less than a week.

[JamieLei]

The problem with assessing the success of a railway scheme on simple financial appraisal is that it ignores the wider economic effects, such as the ability to generate new development in an area that currently has very little; the article mentioned that there was some developer pressure, and the scheme was built through a currently relatively unpopulated area. The Docklands Light Railway in London is a case in point: viewed in its first year of operation, it was an elevated train through the middle of a few derelict waste heaps. It would be a better assessment in about 20 years time when some of that development is built, to see what the ridership figures are. Finally, breaking even is not necessarily the requirement of a successful public transport network: most railways in the world don't break even, and most of them can hardly be considered failures.

The article says that is lost Rs1.59bn over two years; that's £16.3m or US$23.6m, or rather half that for each year of operation, which is admittedly high, but not off the scale for some railways in the west.

[Doorslammer]

The problem with assessing the success of a railway scheme on simple financial appraisal is that it ignores the wider economic effects, such as the ability to generate new development in an area that currently has very little; the article mentioned that there was some developer pressure, and the scheme was built through a currently relatively unpopulated area. The Docklands Light Railway in London is a case in point: viewed in its first year of operation, it was an elevated train through the middle of a few derelict waste heaps. It would be a better assessment in about 20 years time when some of that development is built, to see what the ridership figures are. Finally, breaking even is not necessarily the requirement of a successful public transport network: most railways in the world don't break even, and most of them can hardly be considered failures.

The article says that is lost Rs1.59bn over two years; that's £16.3m or US$23.6m, or rather half that for each year of operation, which is admittedly high, but not off the scale for some railways in the west.

Yeah, but monorail is a bit overkill really! A more traditional setup would have sufficed, light rail for instance.

[kamnet]

Somebody pointed out to me that there should be a significant boost in ridership once the third section is complete, which takes the line into downtown Mumbai. Also pointed out that this type of loss isn't uncommon even with mature rail projects.