PANAJI
Enter Ashwani Kumar, an Indian Railways engineer and Emil Jacob, owner of Jacob Innovations LLC, and Panaji could have a more workable solution to its problems.
Ashwani and Jacob worked on a caterpillar train system which won them the Climate CoLab competition organised by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston for 2016.
The 1997-batch officer of the Indian Railway Traffic Service, will now present this idea to academicians and town planners at a global conference in Boston in September this year.
The design is in response to the decades-long question of how to integrate effective mass transit into an urban environment without creating an eyesore or adding to traffic congestion. The arch-supported elevated C-Train concept rose to the top of the 29 submissions in the Transportation category of MIT’s challenge to win the award.
The C-Train is designed to run on elevated tracks supported by poles which are bent into arches and can run at a maximum speed of around 100 kms/hr.
The elevated train coaches will be lightweight and will have a capacity of accommodating 20 passengers at a time. Additionally, the coaches will have wheels on top and below making it possible to run on the track as well as under the track.
Panaji is all set to get funding from the Centre under the ambitious ‘Smart City Mission’ of Prime Minister Narendra Modi with one of the core infrastructure elements in a smart city being efficient urban mobility and public transport.
Every day nearly one lakh vehicles, two-wheelers and four-wheelers, enter the city of Panaji. With haphazard parking and chaotic traffic movement, Panaji witnesses choc-a-bloc situation during peak hours. So the C-Train which rests only on bent pillars and which does not consume much space like the conventional metro system could be looked at an option to ease the traffic on city roads.
If C-Train is introduced as a public transportation system, it will reduce the inflow of vehicles in the city, existing parking spaces will be utilised properly and there will be no need to create additional parking spaces. All this would cost one-fifteenth of the conventional metro system. And it can go wherever a five-metre road exists.
With this project, an option has provided to urban areas to address their traffic woes. So the question that remains is who will take the onus of addressing Panaji’s traffic woes “ the Government or the Corporation of the City of Panaji?
