Trams are trundling into oblivion, but Kolkata will do well to keep them

Calcutta Tramways Company (CTC) recently celebrated ‘Tram Yatra,’ commemorating its 150th birthday, with a lot of fanfare. The tram made its debut in the city in 1873, under British rule. For tram lovers in Kolkata, however, the celebration evoked mixed feelings. For, in a way, it also rang the death knell of the tram with the transport department’s announcement that it would be retained only on two routes, and that too as heritage routes, thereby relegating it almost to a museum piece. Even as recently as 2017, the number of routes on which the West Bengal Transport Corporation (CTC was merged with it) was running trams regularly on 25 routes.

Initially, the coaches were pulled by Australian horses, which did not survive the heat and strain. It was revived with a steam engine in 1882, and in 1902, electrically powered coaches were introduced. For many decades, it was the most popular mass transit system with over 40 routes and nonstop service from four in the morning to 11.30 at night. Rabindranath Tagore wrote: Tramer pore tram dariye ache—[in Kolkata] you find tram after tram waiting in a row.

The decline started somewhere in the 1980s. Many blamed the apathy and negligence of the transportation system while more bus routes opened and the new kid in town, the mini-bus, as well as autorickshaws jostled for space. Since 2017, the decline has been even more rapid. Out of the 180 trams that were operational in 2011, only 20 were being run in 2021. Seven tram depots and four sub-depots operational in 2001 fell to only two depots and one sub-depot in 2021.

Not nostalgia alone

But it is not just for the sake of nostalgia that members of the Calcutta Tram Users Association (CTUA), a citizen advocacy group, and other concerned citizens appeal for the retention and revival of the tramway. “Kolkata’s air quality is one of the worst among metros in India. When the world is talking about climate change and the need to bring down our carbon footprint, we are hiving off a non-polluting transport system and filling up the road space, which is a meagre 6%, with vehicles,” says Sagnik Gupta, member of the CTUA. It is cheap and provides a network to localities ‘next door,’ aside from being environmentally friendly in a city with an estimated population of 6,200,000.

The naysayers, on the other hand, argue that the metro railway is just as good on this count. “But it only works as corridors, reaching passengers from one point to another, not as a surface network does. Besides, metro is not cheap for the average commuter,” Gupta reiterates.

Debashish Bhattacharya, president of the CTUA, points out that “today the tram is in operation in more than 400 cities across the world.” In fact, many cities are bringing it back after doing away with it in the 1960s, fuelled by the booming oil and automobile industries.

It is true. Chennai and Mumbai bid farewell to tramways in the 1960s. Now, according to reports, the plans are on for the Bandra-Kurla complex to have a light rail transit (LRT) system, a combination of tram and Metro features. If it happens, the LRT would effectively mean the return of trams to Mumbai.

Abroad too, a new look at the tram system has been gathering pace. The German government reintegrated trams into the public transport system connecting erstwhile East and West Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In Lisbon, Portugal’s capital, whose trams, are an iconic symbol (as also of Kolkata), authorities have decided to retain them after opposition from some quarters because of their new relevance as the European Union is boosting electric mobility in an effort to reach its 2050 climate neutrality target, which means emissions from transport will have to fall by about 90%. Portugal is now making decarbonised urban transport a central pillar of its pandemic recovery fund spending plans.

Cities like Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw, capitals of satellite countries in the Soviet era, had extensive tram networks, which were uprooted later in favour of extra road space. That trend has been in reverse over the recent decades, recognising the sagacity of eco-friendly transport in a world reeling under the effects of climate change.

There has been a collaborative effort by tram lovers of the Australian city and Kolkata titled “Tramjatra”. It started when Roberto D’Andrea, a conductor at Melbourne’s tramway, visited the city in 1994 and found that both had the same features. The ‘Tramjatra’ project started in 1996. The plan to almost permanently do away with the tram on Kolkata streets has dismayed this community too.

Activists say that the blinkered approach to doing away with the tram will affect the health of citizens, with air pollution worsened by the extra vehicles. The transport authorities, as well as the police, blame the tram for obstructing vehicular traffic. But Gupta asks, “technology has changed so much since then. Why not modernise it?”

The authorities also argue that the number of passengers on trams is negligible. After de-reservation was initiated by the government, most tram tracks run along the centre of the roads today, whereas once there was a designated space on both sides of the tracks for passengers to board the trams or alight. This jeopardises the safety of passengers as they have to negotiate speeding traffic to get across. So even those who want to board the tram, especially senior citizens, avoid it.

It has been proven that, when used intelligently as part of the mass transit system, trams can help cities meet their clean air targets and ensure a lower carbon footprint. The average speed of trams is also considerably higher than the speed of vehicular traffic across bustling intersections and overcrowded roads.

“We already have the tracks and infrastructure for LRT, for example. We can do it at a fraction of the cost that laying new Metrorail tracks entails, especially on less-priority routes. But it’s conveniently ignored. It’s a matter of will and foresight how one looks at the transport needs of a city,” says Bhattacharya.

(Ranjita Biswas is a Kolkata-based writer)