Personalized Rapid Transit Systems - An Approach Towards Solving Urban Transport Problems, A Case Study in Gurgaon City, Haryana

Personalised Rapid Transit (PRT) is one of the latest trends in urban public transport.It is a demand responsive, environment friendly, low cost system which can be implemented either in a particular route such as the one used in a mass rapid transit system (MRTS) or in a grid network. That is why it is a personalized transit and provides the traveler withthe joy of travelling in small module car with a seating capacity of 2 to 6 persons.Though the system was invented in 1964, it was never implemented properly except in Morgantown, U.S.A. Heathrow airport in London has also started to move passengers between various terminals. In India, the system is poised to take a leap. The city of Amritsar is planning a PRT system. Gurgaon, a satellite city of the national capital of Delhi, has proposed seven different routes to start a PRT operation as a local mode of transport. In this paper, an attempt is made to determinethe economic and financial viability of this new system in the Indian context. In order to carry out a rational and scientific study, various surveys were carried out and existing PRT systems across the world were studied. One of the proposed routes was selected and slightly modified to carry out the study. A household survey, a commuter survey, a user opinion survey, and the willingness-to-pay survey were carried out to make the assumptions more realistic. In order to make the results more rational and to find out the best system to adopt in Gurgaon’s situation, different scenarios were developed based on the growth of ridership and varying fare structure. Depending on changing ridership,a detailed cost benefit analysis was conducted for each scenario to find out the economic internal rate of return (EIRR) and the net present value (NPV) for Economic analysis, and the financial internal rate of return (FIRR) and NPV for financial analysis. Finally a set of different IRRs and NPVs for different scenarios were developed and sensitivity analysis was carried out to assess the economic and financial feasibility of PRT system in context of Gurgaon