Summary:
It is noted that there will not be much difference in the cost of constructing a viaduct which is common for a metro rail or an e-bus but converting an electric busway into a metro rail entails huge expenditure on coaches, signal and telecommunications and electrical installations. The second, which is in fact the bigger obstacle, is it’s linking up with the Central government’s new metro rail policy which is in the process of evaluation and public consultations. But this is also in the thought process as the future requirement, say for the next 15 to 20 years is to be kept in mind. “We are not sure what the new policy will say about a host of criteria and whether Vijayawada metro will be at least a striking distance from the targets,” the AMRC official observed. A senior official of the Amaravati Metro Rail Corporation (AMRC) told The Hindu that the Vijayawada Metro would not be able to match the peak passengers-per-hour-per-direction (called ‘ridership’) requirement, which is minimum 20,000 in a single direction, for at least the next two-and-a-half decades..