Nov/21/2011

Metro Rail: promises galore and so are questions

CMRL Managing Director says that issues will be addressed by multi-modal integration study that is currently on

With the city well into its north-east monsoon spell, preparations are afoot at a feverish pace to commence work on the underground section of the Chennai Metro Rail project.

Full-scale construction is expected to start along the Poonamallee High Road by January, immediately after the monsoon comes to a close. Diaphragm walls, reaching to a depth of 22-23 metre below the ground level, have already started coming up at six locations – Washermenpet, May Day Park, Egmore, Nehru Park, Kilpauk and Shenoy Nagar.

All underground tunnelling and station construction work would begin only after construction of the diaphragm walls, which would prevent the soil on either side from collapsing. A senior official of Chennai Metro Rail Limited said that a team from CMRL carried out inspections of the Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) in China last month. Eleven such machines are expected to arrive at the Chennai port next month.

Traffic management plan

Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Sanjay Arora said that a comprehensive traffic management plan prepared for Poonamallee High Road and Anna Nagar would be put in place by January. “We are working on a plan for the Anna Salai stretch. Each location where an underground station is coming up has been treated as a ‘segment'.”

Of the 36 Metro stations, 20 would be underground and Mr.Arora said that each of those ‘segments' would have its own unique traffic plan that will be implemented in a staggered fashion as the construction progresses. Projections show that the average vehicular speed on arterial roads would drop by 6 kmph when underground tunnelling work begins. “Temporary footpath space or ramps would be provided for pedestrians,” Mr.Arora added. Though the city would have to live with traffic flow problems over the next two years, once the metro rail network is in place, it is expected to reduce journey time by 50-75 per cent, the CMRL official said. A passenger will be able to travel from Chennai Central station to Anna Nagar in just 14 minutes as against the 30 - 40 minutes that it takes now by bus. The travel time from Mannady in Georgetown to the airport in Meenambakkam would come down by as much as half. It would take 44 minutes by the Metro to cover the distance of about 22 km whereas it takes anywhere between 75-90 minutes by bus at present.

But even as the promise of a world-class public transportation system is being keenly awaited by the city's residents, there are several issues that have been left unaddressed till now which might determine the eventual success or failure of Metro Rail.

Experts say that the issue of pedestrian access has lacked enough attention despite CMRL's projections showing that 16,000 persons would come out on to Anna Salai each hour from proposed stations such as the one near LIC building by 2016.

CMRL Managing Director K.Rajaraman said that these aspects would be addressed by a multi-modal integration study that is currently on. “It would be submitted early next year to the Chennai Unified Metropolitan Transport Authority (CUMTA), which would be in a position to give appropriate directions to various agencies,” he said. There are also proposals to introduce feeder bus services along 23 routes from and to the stations.

‘Tunnel effect?'

Another facet highlighted even by the detailed project report prepared for the Chennai Metro Rail project is that in many sections of the elevated corridor, just 2-3 metres would be exposed to open air – creating a “tunnel effect”, darkening the entire arterial road below.

The report goes on to say that international experience shows such areas are highly prone to anti-social activity, crime and overall deterioration in urban environment (Example: Jackson Heights and Brooklyn stations in New York).

The proposed Metro fare structure (Rs.8-23) is also likely to change in light of the State government announcing a hike in bus fares. The Metro fares are to be arrived at as a multiple of that charged by Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC) for its air-conditioned buses.

“The fare structure as of now is fluid. We will take a call based on energy costs,” Mr. Rajaraman said.

Stressing that the city cannot rely on the Metro alone to improve traffic conditions, N.S. Srinivasan, former director, National Transportation Planning and Research Centre, said: “The modal share of public transport may go up once the Metro Rail becomes operational, but the absolute number of private vehicles would still be a problem. Most arterial roads would still be congested.”

Chennai's future as a sustainable urban area looks bleak unless some major interventions are made on the urban planning front, he adds.

He added that a study is required to determine whether the Metro network, comprising two corridors, must be stopped with the existing 45 km under construction or extended further.

“Integration will prove difficult otherwise. For example, people would be expected to walk for about 1.5 km to interchange between the monorail and metro rail corridors at Kathipara junction. No one is going to accept it.”

Cut-off from debate

There is also a section of the city's population that has been completely cut off from the ongoing debate on the need to improve the quality of life of residents, of which the metro rail network is a symbol.

A.T.B. Bose of the North Chennai People's Rights Federation said: “I get angry when I see ongoing metro rail work in other parts of the city. Back in 2004, Tiruvottiyur-Airport was the first Metro corridor that was proposed. It was dropped in favour of a monorail network by the AIADMK government initially and the Tiruvottiyur link was overlooked by the next government because of additional costs. Now, we have neither monorail nor metro rail.”

World's ‘lightest material' developed

Scientists have developed what they claim is the world's lightest material — a metal with a density of 0.9 mg/cc.

A team from the University of California, the California Institute of Technology and the HRL Laboratories says that the new material redefines the limits of lightweight materials because of its unique “micro-lattice” cellular architecture.

The scientists were able to make a material that consists of 99.99 per cent air by designing the 0.01 per cent solid at the nanometre, micron and millimetre scales, the latest issue ofSciencereported.

“The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than a human hair,” said lead scientist Tobias Schaedler of HRL.

The material's architecture allows unprecedented mechanical behaviour for a metal, including complete recovery from compression exceeding 50 per cent strain and high energy absorption, say the scientists.

“Materials actually get stronger as the dimensions are reduced to the nano-scale. Combine this with the possibility of tailoring the architecture of the micro-lattice and you have a unique cellular material,” team member Lorenzo Valdevit said.

Developed for the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, the novel material could be used for battery electrodes and acoustic, vibration or shock energy absorption, say the scientists.

William Carter, manager of the architected materials group at HRL, compared the new material to larger, more familiar edifices: “Modern buildings, exemplified by the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge, are incredibly light and weight-efficient by virtue of their architecture. We are revolutionising lightweight materials by bringing this concept to the nano and micro scales.”

There’s no such thing as empty space

Through the Dynamical Casimir Effect, scientists have stimulated a vacuum to shed some of the myriad "virtual" particles that fleet in and out of existence, making them real and detectable.

Scientists claim to have produced particles of light out of vacuum, proving that space is not empty.

An international team says that its ingenious experiment in which tiny parcels of light, or photons, are produced out of empty space has confirmed that a vacuum contains quantum fluctuations of energy, the ‘Nature’ journal reported.

In fact, the scientists have demonstrated for the first time a strange phenomenon known as the dynamical Casimir effect, or DCE for short.

The DCE involves stimulating the vacuum to shed some of the myriad “virtual” particles that fleet in and out of existence, making them real and detectable. Moreover, the real photons produced by the DCE in their experiment collectively retain a peculiar quantum signature that ordinary light lacks.

The research, led by Chris Wilson of Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, shows that a related dynamic effect can occur when such a mirror moves very fast through the vacuum. The DCE was predicted over 40 years ago, but had not yet been observed experimentally due to the difficulty of creating the required experimental conditions.

“The DCE was conceived as a kind of thought experiment, sort of like Schrodinger’s Cat. According to quantum theory, if one could accelerate a mirror very quickly to near the speed of light, the mirror would radiate light as some of the mirror’s motional energy is imparted to virtual photons lurking in the vacuum, converting them into real photons.

“But it is practically impossible to accelerate a massive mirror to such high velocities. The required accelerations would be greater than the kind of shocks found in supernova or nuclear weapons explosions,” said team member Prof Tim Duty.

Instead, the scientists set out to demonstrate the DCE using microwaves, like those used for mobile phone and wireless communication signals. And instead of a massive mirror, they used a tiny microcircuit called a Superconducting Quantum Interference Device, or SQUID.

The SQUID acts as a tunable mirror for virtual microwave photons, fooling them into behaving as if they encountered a moving mirror when in fact nothing is physically moving.

Furthermore, they had to cool the experiment to a small fraction of a degree above absolute zero in order to get rid of unwanted thermal microwaves that would mask the DCE.

“The fact that the quantum vacuum is not empty, as demonstrated in our experiment, is related to lots of other interesting effects such as Hawking radiation of black holes and the Lamb shift in atomic physics,” Prof Duty said.

M-governance gains momentum

Governments worldwide have successfully deployed mobile-based technologies for providing a wide variety of public services, and the Indian States are following suit.

A few years ago, Kerala launched ‘Dr. SMS,' an m-health information system, for providing information on medical facilities available in the locality of the resident. Goa followed, with a mobile governance initiative for issuing alerts for receipt of government applications and complaints and status tracking. Next came Maharashtra. It adopted a similar traffic management system through mobile alerts.

“It is obvious, from the way in which mobile markets have grown in India, that not only are mobile phone-based applications are popular, but they are also more inclusive in their reach because it is a medium that people are familiar with,” says Nishant Shah, director-research, Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore.

A laudable initiative launched by the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation in September tries to use technology in an area that requires continuous monitoring. A mobile phone-based Intelligent Garbage Monitoring System enables sanitary supervisors to report the status of cleaning of garbage bins through their GPS-enabled mobile phones. Centralised reports as well as those of individual bins can be generated with the system. The map with a GIS interface spans all areas of the city. Managing the number of trips, gathering daily summary of the clearance and, most importantly, reports of the bins that are full but have not been cleared can also be obtained.

When trash is collected, each bin is photographed with a camera phone. The image is loaded on the website, where it is monitored by an administrator in the municipality office. Earlier, the clearing of bins was monitored through information from sanitary supervisors.

“The manual process consumes a lot of time. The use of information technology to monitor municipal services can also increase worker productivity,” says S. Raghavendra, administration officer, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.

Experts say that though mobile applications for public services delivery use light technologies, they require collaboration among all stakeholders.